Rose and Nine The Updated Inbetweens and backstories
by SciFiFanForever
Summary: I have updated the story to include all the BBC books, filling in the bits between episodes, books, and back stories of things mentioned by the characters with new chapters, scenes and dialogue. I have tried not to include too many spoilers for people who haven't read the books, and can highly recommend them. (The PDF versions are available at iguanasrus)
1. Chapter 1

**Chapter 1**

'By the way,' he said. 'Did I mention? It also travels in time.'

The Doctor stepped back inside the magical, blue box, leaving the door open. Was it enough? Rose wasn't the type to fall for a hard sell, but had he undersold it? He reckoned that after all she'd been through in her nineteen years, if she knew she could come back to this point in time and space, and pick up where she had left off, and then she might just go for it.

From the shadows behind the open door he spied on her. Watched her turn to Mickey and say something, kiss him, and then she was running towards the TARDIS, her hair flying, and he knew that everything was going to be all right.

She ran up the slope to the console, and he closed the door behind her. 'Right then, Rose Tyler, you tell me. Where do you want to go? Backwards or forwards in time. It's your choice. What's it going to be?'

She had that incredible smile on her face, like she had that Christmas, when she saw that red bike. 'Forwards.'

'How far?'

Wow, she'd never thought about that before, how far should she go? 'One hundred years.'

He set the temporal coordinates for one hundred years, and powered up the systems, activating the materialise/de-materialise function, and gradually increasing the space-time throttle, causing the Time Rotor to pump up and down. After a couple of seconds, the Time Rotor stopped.

'There you go. Step outside those doors, it's the twenty second century.'

She felt like Marty McFly in Back To The Future. 'You're kidding.' If she opened those doors, she would be in her own future. Would she have any children? Grandchildren even?

The Doctor brought her out of her musing. 'That's a bit boring, though. Do you want to go further?'

'Fine by me,' she said with a grin.

'Ten thousand years in the future. Step outside, it's the year 12005, the new Roman Empire,' he said with pompous pride, Ali would be clicking her mandibles at him if she were here.

'You think you're so impressive,' she said teasingly.

'I am so impressive.' He was confident now, she'd come aboard, and he could feel her excitement.

'You wish.'

That sounded like a challenge. 'Right then, you asked for it. I know exactly where to go. Hold on!' The Time Rotor pumped up and down again, and after a couple of seconds, it stopped. He had a mischievous grin on his face.

Where are we? What's out there?

* * *

 **Thames** **Embankment, London**

 **Sunday 6th March 2005**

Mickey just stood there in the alley, looking at the spot where that impossible blue box had just stood. He was trying to make sense of his day that had started off the same as any other Sunday. A lie in, get up and watch a bit of kids TV while he had his breakfast and a cup of tea.

It had got a bit weird when Rose came over to use his internet connection, and then asked him to drive her to meet someone who she had contacted online. He'd seen all the warnings about doing that, and knew that no good would come of it. The warnings never said anything about being kidnapped by dustbins and being held in an underground bunker near the Thames by plastic robots!

And then there was that northern git, all ears, leather jacket, and an ego the size of a planet. Had he dreamt it, or was that box really bigger on the inside? Rose just seemed to accept the fact and then ran into it and disappeared. It would be Jimmy Stone all over again, and she could kiss his arse if she thought he would go running back to her when it all ended in tears.

At least that's what he tried to tell himself, but he knew deep down that if Rose needed him, he would be there in a shot. With that thought came the knowledge that it was he that needed Rose, that Rose didn't need anyone, she was strong and independent.

He walked back to the bus stop on the main road to wait for the bus that would take him back to the Powell Estate. As he waited, his thoughts kept going back to his last conversation with Rose.

"Thanks", she had said to him. He wasn't sure what particular thing she was thanking him for; was it for being there for her when that two timing git Jimmy dumped her and ran off to Amsterdam? Was it for driving her about like a personal taxi when she needed to go somewhere? Or was it for the great sex that they had in his bed, well, he thought it was great anyway.

"Thanks for what?" he had asked her, and the way she said "exactly", sounded like she was saying "thanks for nothing". Okay, he hadn't been much good against those plastic dummies, but come on; it's not every day you get eaten by a dustbin. He was a mechanic for God's sake, not some sort of futuristic commando.

The bus eventually came and he climbed aboard, sitting on one of the back seats. He should make it back in time to have a couple of pints in the local before heading back to his flat, and God knows, he needed a drink.

The main topic of conversation in the pub was the shop mannequins that had come to life and attacked people. There had been a lot of casualties, and a number of deaths. There were plenty of theories already posted on the conspiracy websites; military attack robots that ran amok, foreign terrorists, the secretive Torchwood.

Mickey told them it was aliens, which got a laugh and a chorus of "oh yeah, that's a thought", or "nah, ain't no such thing as aliens". He realised that apart from the Doctor and Rose, he was the only one who knew what had happened, and no one believed him.

* * *

Jackie shuffled out of the toilet, where she had had her morning pee and headed for the kitchen to make a brew. She looked at the clock as she filled the kettle, five past eight on a Monday morning and Rose was still in bed. She must have been out late, because she hadn't heard her come in last night. They'd probably been talking about all the hullabaloo of those shop window dummies coming to life and attacking everyone.

Jackie had been watching the news when she got back to the flat, and they had advised everyone to stay in doors while UNIT and the military sorted it out. There was no mention of what had caused it though, and no explanation of why they had suddenly stopped. For no particular reason, Jackie wondered if it had something to do with Henrick's being blown up.

She remembered Rose phoning her and telling her to go home straight away, and she'd sounded frightened. While she waited for the kettle to boil, she went to Rose's room and gently knocked on the door before popping her head inside.

'Rose . . .? You awake?' she whispered. In the dim gloom of the messy room, she could see her bed was empty. That wasn't unusual; she often had a sleep over at Mickey's or Shareen's. This morning though, something niggled, it was how concerned she'd sounded on the phone.

'She could have at least phoned to let me know she was stayin' out,' Jackie mumbled to herself. Never mind, she would pop around to the garage later and have a chat with Mickey.

She went back to the kitchen and made her mug of tea, which she took through to the living room and curled up on the sofa to watch the morning news. It was full of reports about the plastic robot things that had terrorised London last night.

They had interviews with eye witnesses and government officials who were clueless as to what had occurred, but were trying to assure the public that everything was fine and under control.

'That'll be a first if that bunch have anythin' under control,' Jackie told the TV, 'and nobody tried to interview me, I was very nearly killed by one of those things. Whoever's responsible, owes me compensation.'

In the garage, Mickey had his head under the bonnet of a Renault Clio, looking at the distributor.

'Oi, Mickey, have you seen Rose this mornin'? Did she stay at yours last night?' Jackie shouted across the small workshop, that made him bang his head on the bonnet, much to the amusement of his co-workers. He looked from around the raised bonnet and saw Jackie standing there with her hands on her hips.

Oh God, what was he going to tell her? That her daughter had run off with an alien in a time machine that was bigger on the inside? He'd tried that last night at the pub, the laughter and derision from Jackie would be even worse.

'No, the last I saw of her, she was goin' off with that bloke with the ears and the leather jacket,' he said, sounding slightly miffed.

Jackie couldn't help but notice his tone of voice. The poor lad, he was hopelessly in love with Rose, and, although Rose did love him, she had other plans for her life. She wanted to make something of herself, to make a difference, whereas all Mickey wanted to do was earn enough money to buy one of those flash cars that he saw on Top Gear.

'What, the investigator from the insurance company?' Jackie said, looking all confused, why would she go anywhere with him?

'Eh?' Now it was Mickey's turn to be confused. What the hell was the alien doing working for an insurance company?

'He came around to the flat on Saturday to see Rose about the explosion at Henrick's,' she told him.

Ah, now he understood, Jackie had jumped to the conclusion, and missed.

'Yeah, that's him,' Mickey said. 'It was probably about the compensation or somethin'.'

'Have you two had a fight? You sound sort of . . .. resentful or somethin'.'

'Nah, it's just the way she goes off on a whim without givin' me a second thought.'

'Maybe she'd gotten a job offer or somethin',' Jackie suggested, trying to think the best of her daughter, and make Mickey feel less rejected.

'Yeah, maybe,' he said, appreciating her effort to make him feel better.

Later that afternoon, Jackie returned to the flat with some carrier bags of shopping from the local supermarket. 'Rose, are you back?' She called out down the hallway, the silence was deafening. She went through to the kitchen and put the bags on the table. She took her phone out of her pocket and selected Rose's number from the contacts menu.

Enough was enough, and like many teenagers, Rose had always been bad at keeping in touch. But after the events of the last few days, she wanted to know that she was alright. She waited for the connection to ring, but instead she heard the polite recorded message, 'it has not been possible to connect your call, please try again'.

She did try again, and got the same polite message that told her that she was unable to contact her missing daughter. Now she was starting to worry. She selected Mickey's number and tried that instead.

After a few rings, he answered the call. 'Hi Jackie, what can I do for ya?'

'Mickey, I still haven't heard from Rose, and I can't get through to her phone. I've got to be honest Mickey, I'm gettin' worried.'

Maybe she was right to be worried, Mickey thought, after all, those Autons and that Nestene thing had nearly killed them. But that Doctor bloke, with all his ego and attitude, had looked after Rose, and Mickey felt that he would do whatever was needed to keep her safe.

'I wouldn't worry about her Jackie, I'm sure she'll be fine. Remember what it was like when she ran off with that wanker Jimmy? You didn't hear from her for ages.'

'Yeah, I know, but I knew where she was then, she was in that grotty bed-sit,' Jackie replied. Mickey was taking this all rather well, to say his girlfriend had gone missing. Did he know something he wasn't telling her? 'Maybe Shareen's seen her, have you got her number?'

Mickey hesitated; he knew Shareen hadn't seen her. 'Er, I don't think she has.'

Jackie was getting suspicious. 'Well, maybe Shareen knows somethin'; Rose should have her number somewhere in her room.'

Mickey realised that Jackie would contact Shareen whatever. 'Hang on; I've got her number here.'

'Thanks Mickey, I'll speak to you later,' Jackie said as she wrote down the number. She disconnected the call and then dialled Shareen's number.

'Hello?' A young woman's voice said.

'Shareen? It's Rose's mum, have you seen anythin' of Rose the last couple of days?'

'Oh, hello Mrs. Tyler, I spoke to Rose on the phone Saturday night after I saw the news about Henrick's, but I haven't heard from her since. Is there a problem?'

'It's probably nothin', Mickey thinks it might be a new job offer or somethin', it's just that she's gone off somewhere and hasn't been in touch.'

'Nothin' new there then,' Shareen laughed.

Jackie relaxed a little and laughed with her. 'Yeah, yer right there Love.'

A week later, Shareen phoned Jackie to see if she had heard from Rose. They were best mates, and regularly kept in touch to gossip about anything and everything.

It was at this point that Jackie phoned the police.


	2. Chapter 2

**Chapter 2**

 **Peckham Police Station.**

 **177 Peckham High Street. SE15 5SL.**

'So Mr. Smith, do you mind if I call you Mickey?' The detective asked him in the interview room.

'No I don't mind you callin' me Mickey,' he replied in a huff. 'What I do mind is you lot accusin' me of murderin' my girlfriend.'

'Mickey, we're not accusing you of anything….'

'Jackie is,' he shot back.

'Mrs. Tyler is understandably concerned about her daughter's disappearance, and she informs us that you don't seem unduly concerned about it, that's all. We just need you to tell us what you know about her whereabouts, and this man that she allegedly left with.'

Oh great! If he didn't get locked up in prison for the murder of Rose, he'd get locked up in the loony bin for believing she'd been abducted by aliens (well 'an alien' at least).

'Okay, I last saw her Sunday before last, y'know after all those plastic dummies tried to kill everybody. This Doctor bloke seemed to know all about it and stopped them. 'Right then, I'll be off, unless, er, I don't know, you could come with me' he said, and off she went.'

'Doctor who?' The detective asked.

'Dunno, just the Doctor. Some sort of scientist or secret agent I suppose.'

'What makes you think that?'

'Like I said, he seemed to know all about them plastic things and how to stop them.'

'And you haven't heard from Miss Tyler since that night?'

'Nah, it was the same when she ran off with Jimmy Stone last year. Maybe you should be askin' 'im where she is.'

'Oh don't worry, we will. Does a lot of running off with other men does she?'

'Hey, what you tryin' to say about my Rose? That she's some sort of trollop or somethin'? It was only that wanker Stone who enticed her with lies about becomin' a famous rock star.'

'And now a mysterious doctor. How does that make you feel Mickey? Does it make you angry that she'll just run off and leave you? Does it make you want to punish her?'

'NO! I love Rose, an' in her own way, I know she loves me. I know what you're doin', you're tryin' to get me all riled up so that I'll say that I wanted to kill her for runnin' off, but it ain't like that, 'cus I love her and I'd never do anythin' to hurt Rose . . .. Never!'

Mickey fell silent as he thought about what he had just said.

Interview terminated at 13:10. We may need to speak to you again Mickey, please let the desk sergeant know if you are going away on holiday or anything like that so that we know how to contact you.

Mickey left the police station and took out his mobile phone, searching through the contacts for Shareen's number. He found it and pressed the dial button.

'Hello Mickey,' Shareen said, having seen it was him on the caller display.

'Hiya Shareen. Have you heard from Rose lately, 'cos I've just been interviewed by the police as a suspect in her disappearance.' Mickey liked to think that Rose would call him before anyone else, but then if she was feeling guilty about running off with "Big Ears", then she might talk it through with her best mate.

'Wha? Seriously? That's crazy. No, I ain't spoken to her since the week before last, when the shop blew up. I wanted to see if she was alright and if she'd got any goss' on what happened. I've tried phonin' her, but all I get is . . .'

'It has not been possible to connect your call,' Mickey finished for her. 'Yeah, me too. Okay, it was worth a try,' he said disappointedly.

'Is she still off travellin' with that insurance bloke you told me about?'

'Yeah, she must be havin' a good time as she's forgotten to phone.'

'Why don't ya try Keisha? She might have heard from her,' Shareen suggested.

'Y'know, that's not a bad idea. I've got to go back to work now, but I can call in to see her on my way home. Thanks Shar, speak to you soon.'

The next morning, Mickey woke up with a certain amount of disorientation. It was partly due to the amount of alcohol he'd consumed the night before when he'd called in to see Keisha. She hadn't heard from Rose, but she invited him in anyway to chat about where she might have got to.

Mickey didn't mind, because he had always suspected that Keisha had a crush on him, and it stroked his "lads" ego. What he didn't know, was that although Rose was her best mate, she was secretly jealous of their relationship. Keisha had always been a shallow, self centred person, and was never able to keep a boyfriend for long.

She had poured them a drink, and after discussing Rose, they started chatting about growing up on the estate, how they'd both came from dysfunctional families and broken homes, and then about anything in general.

He'd drunk so much, that he couldn't remember how he'd got home, or how he'd gotten to bed, and that was when the other cause of his disorientation hit him like a slap in the face… He wasn't in his bed, and he wasn't alone in whoever's bed he was in.

When he rolled over, he was suddenly very sober, and the sick feeling in the pit of his stomach had nothing to do with his hangover. He catapulted out of her bed as though he'd been on a trampoline.

'Keish! What's goin' on? What happened?' he asked urgently.

She gave him a lopsided smile. 'That memorable eh? You really know how to make a girl feel special, don'tcha.'

He slowly realised that she was smirking as she was looking at him, and she wasn't looking at his face. Her gaze was focussed on an area below his waist. He looked down, and saw that he was naked.

'Oh my God, what have I done?' he dropped to the floor and gathered his clothes together, holding them in front of him as he hedged around the room, and backed out of the door.

'Sorry Keish, I've got to go to work… This was a mistake… A big mistake.'

As the door closed, Keisha's playful giggle and teasing smile, turned into an evil, malicious grin.

* * *

Seven weeks after Rose had disappeared off the face of the Earth, Jackie heard the doorbell chime out.

'Rose?' She asked, her hopes rising and her heart pounding suddenly. Had she come home for her birthday? She hurried down the hallway and opened the door to her friend and neighbour, Ru Chan. She was holding a pink envelope and a small package covered in birthday wrapping paper.

Jackie looked at the birthday card and gift for Rose and started to cry.

'No news then?' Ru asked. Jackie wailed, and Ru enveloped her in a comforting hug. 'Oh Jackie, I'm sure she'll be alright,' her friend said trying to comfort her.

'I wish I was sure Ru, but she's never been off like this before without gettin' in touch. I know somethin's wrong, I can't feel her in here,' Jackie said, holding her fist over her heart.

'Here, come and sit down, I'll put the kettle on, and then I'll call Billy Crewe, he's got a computer with one of them fancy laser printers, we can make up some flyers and posters.'

Jackie dabbed her eyes with a tissue. 'Oh, that's a good idea; someone's bound to have seen her.'

'Of course they will, and it'll jog their memories,' Ru said, going through to the kitchen. 'I hear that Keisha Selby and her cronies have been givin' Mickey hell, puttin' accusin' letters through his letterbox and threatening him with violence. And he's been interviewed by the police again.'

'Quite right too,' Jackie called out from the living room. 'Okay, I don't agree with what Keisha's doin', but he knows somethin', and it's like he's afraid to say anythin'.'

'You can't think Mickey had anythin' to do with Rose's disappearance can you? I mean, he's besotted with her, and he wouldn't hurt a fly.'

'And what is it they say? It's always the quiet ones, the ones you never suspect….'

 **Peckham Police Station (again).**

 **177 Peckham High Street. SE15 5SL.**

'So, Mickey, we've made some enquiries, and we've got a few more questions for you,' the detective said.

Mickey just glared at him, giving him a sullen, defiant look.

'Jimmy Stone is out of the picture, he's in a Dutch prison at the moment. You however, are in this picture. For the tape, I'm showing Mr. Smith a frame from a pizzeria security camera, dated sixth of March.' He slid the photo across the table where Mickey could see it. It showed the Auton version of Mickey attacking Rose and the Doctor.

'Is that you in the photo, attacking Miss Tyler and her new "friend"? Were you enraged at the thought of Miss Tyler dumping you for this other man?' The detective asked with a raised eyebrow.

'No, I was nowhere near that restaurant.'

'We have witnesses that saw you there. Miss Tyler was so frightened by you that she set the fire alarm off. In the confusion, some of the witnesses claim that the man in the picture pulled your head off, but I think we can discount those claims.'

'I'm tellin' you it wasn't me, it was one of those plastic robot things made to look like me. And if you hadn't noticed 'detective', my head is still firmly on my shoulders. I was in a dustbin outside that bloke Clive's house, and the bloke in the photo is the Doctor that Rose went off with.' There, let them argue with those facts, Mickey thought.

'Ah yes, Clive Finch, we spoke to his widow when you told us about Miss Tyler going to see him.'

'Widow? He's dead?' Mickey asked, this was getting very disturbing; anybody who knew about the Doctor seemed to end up missing or dead.

'Yes, an unfortunate victim of those plastic robots. His widow gave us permission to look in his shed; it appears he'd been very busy looking for this man you call the Doctor. For the tape, I'm showing Mr. Smith a photo from Clive Finch's files of the individual known as the Doctor.'

When Mickey looked at the photo, he could see the unmistakable big ears and leather jacket, in the crowd of onlookers in Dealey Plaza in Dallas. He was stunned, that flash git was telling the truth, if that was him in that photograph, then he must be able to travel in time like he had said.

'Anything to say?' The detective asked, wondering if Mickey could cast any light on how this man could be in that picture.

'Oh I've got plenty to say, but you lot ain't listening,' Mickey said, getting annoyed now. 'My girlfriend goes missin', and all you lot can do is pick on her poor, unfortunate boyfriend. You listen to her mother's gossip and lies.' He was on a roll now.

'Look, I don't know where Rose is, all I know is she went with this Doctor bloke, and he's bad news. Danger seems to follow him around and people end up dead, and Rose went with him, just like that, and I'm scared for her, scared that she's gonna end up dead too.'

He finished his rant and stood up. 'Now, you either charge me with somethin' and get me a lawyer, or I start going to the papers or my MP or somebody an' start shoutin' police harassment.' He glared at the detective, challenging him to arrest him, because he had had enough and he was ready for a fight.

He knew it wasn't their fault really. Hell, they probably weren't looking on the right planet, the Doctor had said he could go anywhere in the universe. And now he knew they probably weren't even looking in the right century.

'Interview terminated 14:37.' The detective stood up and showed Mickey to the door. 'If it's any consolation, I believe you, and I will find Rose, I promise.'

Mickey gave a half smile of thanks and nodded his appreciation before leaving the interview room. The detective followed him out, escorting him through the security door into the reception area and out of the main entrance.

When the detective went back to his desk in the main office, his superintendent was waiting for him, along with a man in a suit that he hadn't seen before.

'Detective Preece, my name is Duncan Prescott; I wonder if I could have a minute of your time?' The strangers ID badge said that he was from 'The Torchwood Institute'.

'Er, yeah, of course.'

'You can use my office,' the superintendent said.

Five minutes later, the man from Torchwood left the office, and the station unnoticed. The superintendent found Detective Preece sitting in the office when he returned.

'Are you alright Preece?'

Preece jumped at the intrusion. 'Oh, sorry sir, miles away there. I'll just go and finish the report on the Tyler case and close the file.'

'If you think that's best.'

'Yes sir, all the evidence points towards an impressionable young woman taking off with a rich sugar daddy. She'll be back when it all goes sour again, like it did last time.'

'Good work Preece,' he said as he went around his desk and sat down. Preece stood and left his superior's office, returning to his own desk to close the file on this missing person's case.

Both men went about their business, unaware of anyone called the Doctor, or his ability to show up at a number of historic occasions. There were no security camera photographs of him, and no witness statements from a pizzeria.

Mickey had no more calls for police interviews, and Clive Finch was just another conspiracy theorist who had been in the wrong place at the wrong time.


	3. Chapter 3

**Chapter 3**

Rose was standing at the observation window of Gallery 15, with tears in her eyes. She was looking out at an expanded Sun, and the remains of the Earth. 'The end of the Earth…, it's gone.' Her voice was breaking with the emotion of it all, she never realised that time travel would be like this.

She heard the Doctor walking towards her. 'We were too busy saving ourselves, no one saw it go.' She blinked away the tears. 'All those years, all that history, and no one was even looking. It's just….' She couldn't put into words the feeling of loss for her home.

The Doctor held out his hand, and she took it, and they felt it again, that feeling of 'rightness' at that simple touch of their hands, just as it had been in the basement of Henrick's three days ago.

'Come with me,' he said, and they silently walked out of the Gallery.

'Where are we goin'?' she asked him as the Time Rotor pumped up and down.

'To cheer you up,' he said with a warm smile.

She heard the TARDIS land and the rotor stop. 'Go on then,' he said, nodding at the doors.

'Where are we?'

In answer, he just nodded at the doors and grinned. She walked down the ramp, and glanced over her shoulder to see him grinning at her and waggling his eyebrows. She opened the door and stepped out onto a busy London street.

There were people everywhere. She heard a baby cry, a man laugh, and the door of the TARDIS open. 'Big Issue! Big Issue!' a man was calling.

'You think it'll last forever, people and cars and concrete, but it won't. One day it's all gone. Even the sky,' he said, and they both looked up at that beautiful, blue sky.

He could see that she was still tearful after her experience on Platform One. It was difficult for him to admit it, but he knew how she felt. 'My planet's gone . . .. It's dead. It burned like the Earth. It's just rocks and dust before it's time.'

Rose looked at him in surprise as he stared ahead. 'What happened?' she asked him, her voice full of concern.

'There was a war and we lost.'

'A war with who?' He didn't answer; she could see him struggling with the emotion of the memory. When he didn't answer, she asked a different question. 'What about your people?'

'I'm a Time Lord. I'm the last of the Time Lords. They're all gone. I'm the only survivor. I'm left travelling on my own 'cos there's no one else.'

Rose's heart was breaking for him. No wonder he was so sullen and grumpy at times. The thought of him being all alone in the universe was unbearable.

'There's me,' she offered without a second thought.

He was stunned by her offer, and her eyes still had the remnants of tears in them, either for the loss of the Earth, or the loss of his people, he wasn't sure. 'You've seen how dangerous it is…; do you want to go home?'

That was a leading question. Did she want to go home? Her emotions were so fragile at the moment that she really didn't know. She had never been so terrified in her life, and yet she had never felt more alive.

'I don't know,' she told him; she was trying to put into words how she felt. 'I want….' Suddenly, real life imposed itself on her senses, focussing her thoughts in the here and now. 'Oh, can you smell chips?'

The Doctor smiled, he could feel her mood lifting. 'Yeah . . .. Yeah.'

'I want chips.' Before she made any decisions, she wanted to eat chips.

'Me too,' he agreed, nobody made chips like humans.

'Right then, before you get me back in that box, chips it is, and you can pay.'

'Back in that box', she said 'back in that box', oh, that was fantastic news. At the moment though, there was a small problem.

'No money,' he said sheepishly.

'What sort of date are you?' she said with a smile. 'Come on then, tight wad, chips are on me. We've only got five billion years 'til the shops close.'

She gave him a smile, and he didn't know it at that moment, but he would come to love that smile, where her tongue would just peek from between her teeth. She would use that smile when she was teasing him, and she would come to love using that smile on him, because she would come to love teasing him.

They followed their noses and quickly found the small Cafe on Duncannon Street that was cooking chips. 'Two bags of chips please,' Rose said to the girl behind the counter.

They took their chips, wrapped in white paper, and walked down the street towards Trafalgar Square, where they sat by the fountains.

'This is weird y'know, I was sittin' here, what was it, three, four days ago with Mickey, eatin' my lunch before goin' back to work. And now look at me; I'm sittin' here eatin' chips with you, before I go…, where?'

'Anywhere you want,' he said as he bit into a chip. 'Only, I think five thousand million years was a bit too far for your first trip, maybe something a bit more local.'

'Y'got that right,' she said with a laugh. 'What about the past, somethin' that's already happened, that would be alright wouldn't it?'

'Of course it would, only maybe not Jurassic or anything like that; might be too far the other way.'

'Mmmmm.' She was savouring a particularly large chip. 'Agreed. Hang on though, what about if I meet one of my ancestors, isn't that dangerous?'

'That depends,' he said seriously.

'Depends on what?' she asked him with concern.

'Depends on who your ancestors are. I mean, if they're all homicidal maniacs with guns and knives and stuff, well, that meeting wouldn't end well.' He gave her his big cheeky smile and she burst into a fit of giggles.

'You nutter, you had me goin' then, but isn't there somethin' about killin' your own grandfather?'

'Theoretically, yeah, you could compromise your own existence, but the TARDIS has paradox avoidance systems that minimise the chance of that happening.' He picked at the last few scraps of chips and batter before screwing up the paper.

'Right then,' he said as he stood up and dropped the paper in a bin. 'You've seen 'Back to the Future'; now let's go forward to the past.' He held out his hand to help her up off the step. She funnelled the paper and tipped the last bits of her chips into her mouth, before scrunching up the paper and taking his hand.

With her stomach full of chips, a vibrant city around her, and the melancholy of a few hours ago forgotten, she had a spring in her step and a new eagerness to travel and see what was out there.

The TARDIS was parked next to a row of red telephone boxes at the junction of Duncannon Street and the Strand, near the entrance to Charing Cross Underground. They opened the door, stepped inside, and walked up to the console, where the Doctor started to power up the systems.

Rose looked around the TARDIS with a new awareness of this remarkable ship. It wasn't just the Doctor's time machine; it was the only place in this universe he could call home. It seemed to be old, cobbled together with scavenged parts, and full of character.

There was something else as well, something she was aware of but couldn't put into words. Love, was the closest she could get to it, not like someone loving their house or their car, but an emotional bond between the Doctor and the TARDIS. If she stood still and closed her eyes, she was sure she could feel the TARDIS in her head…, no, it was in her heart.

He had told her on Platform One that the TARDIS was in her head, translating languages for her, what else was she doing in there, was she helping her understand the sad, tortured soul of a refugee from a war that killed all those involved.

'So, this is home for you now then,' she said quietly as she stood beside him.

He stopped what he was doing and looked into her concerned, brown eyes. 'Yeah,' he said with a smile. 'A little bit of home that I can take with me wherever I go. A bit like you humans going camping.'

Rose gave a little laugh. 'Oh yeah, I hadn't thought of it like that.' He was being light hearted about his circumstances, and seemed to be in a "good place" at the moment, so she didn't dwell on it or pester him about it.

'You ready then?' he asked her, she nodded an affirmative with a big, excited smile. 'Off we go then.'

He flicked switches, twiddled knobs and pulled levers to start the Time Rotor and take them into the Vortex. The grating, wheezing sound of the engines got inside your head and your soul, and filled you with a childlike joy.

'Where are we at the moment?' she asked as she watched him move around the console, making adjustments.

'Ask me another one.'

'Eh?'

He looked at her with ancient, piercing blue eyes and smiled. 'Out side of those doors, this moment doesn't exist. We are everywhere and nowhere at the same time, but there's no time, because we are every when and no when.'

Rose gave him a look that, like her teasing smile, he would come to love. A look like a startled rabbit in car headlights. And Rose saw his expression, which she wouldn't love, but would get used to. The look he would give her as though she had dribbled down her blouse.

'It's called the Vortex, or more accurately, the Space/Time Vortex. It exists outside of any normal frame of reference, and within it, light; darkness, matter, and energy all blend, divide, shift, and change. It underlies the whole of Creation, only slightly touching the normal Universe.'

His eyes took on their normal appearance, and Rose realised that her mouth was hanging open, when he used his curled index finger to gently close it.

She gave a little shiver. 'Blimey.'

'Its pathways are twisted, unstable, and hard to follow. A journey through these strange dimensions might take a moment and carry you a million years and a billion light years from your starting point,' he said seriously, and then grinned. 'There again, a journey of months in the Vortex might end in a journey of six feet and ten days in conventional space. Without being able to calculate the pathways, there's simply no way of knowing.'

'So, you're tellin' me, you set the controls and hope for the best?' she said with a look of disbelief and burst out laughing.

'What?' he said with a hurt expression.

'I was just thinkin', if the trains and buses ran like that, they'd go out of business.' He started to laugh with her. 'Imagine gettin' on a train for say, Halifax in Yorkshire, and ending up in Halifax, Nova Scotia, a hundred years late.'

'Or Birmingham, England and end up in Birmingham, Alabama…, no, actually, that's not funny.'

They both burst into fits of laughter. 'Fortunately, I have a TARDIS, which is designed to navigate its way through the Vortex. There are occasional hiccups,' he lied, 'but on the whole, I end up where I intended to be.'

Rose stopped laughing when she realised what he had said. 'Hiccup? What hiccup?'

'Well, not really a hiccup, do you remember I told you the TARDIS has a paradox avoidance system? Well, sometimes the TARDIS has to make changes to the temporal-spatial destination to avoid a disaster.' He felt it was prudent at this point to leave out the bit about the TARDIS taking him where he needed to be, rather than where he wanted to be.

Oh, that's alright then, she said, not seeing his crossed fingers behind his back.

'So, it's time to leave the Vortex, and drop back into conventional time and space.' He started adjusting the controls, and the TARDIS started to shake.

Rose was concerned by the frown on his face. 'What's wrong?'

'Nothing…, much,' he told her as he ran around the console.

'You're not filling' me with confidence here,' she told him.

'Okay, nothing much . . . really. It's nothing that a bit of fine tuning won't take care of,' he said with a grin. 'Here, put your hand on that for me.'

Rose reached over and put her hand on the lever that he had indicated. 'Fantastic!' he beamed at her.

He ran around opposite to where she was standing. 'Hold that one down!' he said, pointing to another lever.

'I'm holding this one down,' she told him, nodding at her hand.

'Well, hold them both down,' he said, giving her that 'dribble' look again.

Rose stretched across the console, arms wide. 'It's not going to work.'

'Oi! I promised you a time machine and that's what you're getting,' he told her, all manic and frenetic. 'Now, you've seen the future, let's have a look at the past. 1860. How does 1860 sound?'

'What happened in 1860?' she asked, slightly confused.

'I don't know, let's find out. Hold on, here we go!'

Rose felt the TARDIS jolt as it hit 1860 Earth, and was thrown to the floor along with the Doctor.

'Blimey!' she exclaimed. She had thought the TARDIS was old and cobbled together, but that was beyond a joke.

'You're telling me,' he said, propping himself up on his elbows before standing up. He looked down at Rose. 'Are you all right?'

'Yeah. I think so,' she said as she climbed to her feet. 'Nothing broken. Did we make it? Where are we?' she asked as she joined him at the view screen.

'I did it. Give the man a medal. Earth, Naples, December 24th, 1860.'

'That's so weird…. It's Christmas,' she said, an hour ago, she was eating chips in March sunshine.

'All yours,' he said with a sweep of his arm towards the doors.

'But, its like, think about it, though. Christmas. 1860. Happens once, just once and it's gone, it's finished, it'll never happen again. Except for you. You can go back and see days that are dead and gone a hundred thousand sunsets ago. No wonder you never stay still.' They were grinning at each other insanely.

'Not a bad life.'

'Better with two,' she beamed at him. 'Come on, then.' She ran towards the doors.

'Hey, where do you think you're going?'

'1860.'

'Go out there dressed like that, you'll start a riot, Barbarella. There's a wardrobe through there. First left, second right, third on the left, go straight ahead, under the stairs, past the bins, fifth door on your left. Hurry up!'

"Blimey, how big is this ship?" she thought to herself, she'd only seen this bit so far, and hadn't considered that there could be more. But then she thought to herself, that if this was his home, he must have a bedroom, a kitchen, and all those other rooms a home should have.

She started to follow his directions, which somehow seemed easy to remember and follow. 'Hang on, did he say stairs?' she asked herself as she took the third left. Yep, sure enough, there they were. This ship had more than one floor!

He had also said 'wardrobe', and she was expecting, well, a wardrobe. If not a wooden one, then at least a walk in one, but this one, you could park a Double Decker bus in here! Calling these two floors of clothing a wardrobe, was like calling Henrick's a closet.

He had got a lot to learn about teenage human women, and she was just the one to teach him. He didn't have to be all flash, trying to impress her with travelling through time and space, just show her the drive-in wardrobe and where she has to sign.


	4. Chapter 4

**Chapter 4**

The Doctor managed to run out of Sneed and Company undertakers just before it exploded, sending him flying across the street. Rose and Charles Dickens ran over to him to see if he was all right as he slowly climbed to his feet.

'She didn't make it,' Rose said, realising that her friend Gwyneth had ignited the gas to destroy the Gelth. She just looked at the Doctor in disbelief.

'I'm sorry,' said the Doctor with sadness in his voice. 'She closed the rift.'

'At such a cost. The poor child,' Dickens added.

The Doctor could see that Rose was upset at her friend's death. She wasn't used to seeing people die, and certainly not in such terrible circumstances. 'I did try, Rose, but Gwyneth was already dead. She had been for at least five minutes.'

'What do you mean?' Rose asked, puzzled.

'I think she was dead from the minute she stood in that arch.'

Gwyneth had used her latent psychic ability to try and contact the Gelth and help them through the rift. But they had deceived and betrayed her, using her to try and invade the Earth.

'But she can't have. She spoke to us. She helped us. She saved us. How could she have done that?'

'There are more things in Heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy,' said Dickens. 'Even for you, Doctor.'

'She saved the world. A servant girl. No one will ever know,' Rose reflected sadly.

'Right then, Charlie boy, I've just got to go into my, er, shed. Won't be long,' the Doctor told him as he put the key in the lock.

'What are you going to do now?' Rose asked Dickens.

'I shall take the mail coach back to London, quite literally post-haste. This is no time for me to be on my own. I shall spend Christmas with my family and make amends to them. After all I've learned tonight, there can be nothing more vital.'

The Doctor turned from the door and smiled. 'You've cheered up.'

'Exceedingly! This morning, I thought I knew everything in the world. Now I know I've just started. All these huge and wonderful notions, Doctor. I'm inspired. I must write about them.'

'Do you think that's wise?' Rose asked, wondering if he would change the future.

But Dickens really was inspired, enthused with a new vision. 'I shall be subtle at first. The Mystery of Edwin Drood still lacks an ending. Perhaps the killer was not the boy's uncle. Perhaps he was not of this Earth. The Mystery of Edwin Drood and the Blue Elementals. I can spread the word, tell the truth.'

'Good luck with it,' the Doctor said sincerely, shaking his hand. 'Nice to meet you . . . Fantastic!'

'Bye, then, and thanks,' said Rose as she shook his hand and kissed him on the cheek, not realising that it was not the done thing in that era.

Dickens became all flustered and blushed. 'Oh, my dear. How modern. Thank you, but, I don't understand. In what way is this goodbye? Where are you going?'

The Doctor gave him his enthusiastic smile. 'You'll see, in the shed.'

'Upon my soul, Doctor, it's one riddle after another with you. But after all these revelations, there's one mystery you still haven't explained. Answer me this. Who are you?'

The Doctor considered his answer. 'Just a friend passing through.'

'But you have such knowledge of future times. I don't wish to impose on you, but I must ask you. My books. Doctor, do they last?'

'Oh, yes!'

'For how long?'

'Forever.' Dickens looked stunned by this answer at first, and then proud. 'Right. Shed. Come on, Rose.'

'In the box? Both of you?'

'Down boy,' the Doctor said with a cheeky smile. 'See you.'

Rose followed the Doctor up the ramp to the console. 'Doesn't that change history if he writes about blue ghosts?'

'In a week's time it's 1870, and that's the year he dies,' he told her. 'Sorry. He'll never get to tell his story.'

They watched Dickens on the view screen, waiting expectantly. 'Oh, no. He was so nice,' said Rose sadly.

The Doctor tried to give her some perspective. Tried to alleviate her sorrow. 'But in your time, he was already dead. We've brought him back to life, and he's more alive now than he's ever been, old Charlie boy. Let's give him one last surprise.'

He started up the Time Rotor, and they saw Dickens start to laugh with the joyous sound of time and space being bent out of shape.

'Well, that's that then,' he said, rubbing his hands together. 'How's about a cuppa then, and then you can change out of that outfit.'

She looked down at the burgundy dress and remembered the half compliment he'd paid her. 'I thought I might keep it on,' she said teasingly. 'What's the matter, don'tcha like it?'

He raised an eyebrow as he gave her an appreciative gaze. 'Very nice, yeah. But not really practical when you need to run for your life is it?'

She gave a single laugh. 'Yeah, s'pose so. C'mon, let's go an' have that cuppa.' They walked hand in hand out of the console room.

When she returned from the wardrobe, she was wearing her purple and grey hoodie, blue jeans, and white trainers. The Doctor was no where to be seen. She wandered around the console and noticed a floor panel had been lifted up.

'Doctor?' She heard the whistling warble of his sonic screwdriver coming from under the floor. She got down on her hands and knees and looked under the floor. 'Whatcha doin'?'

'Just making some adjustments to the flux capacitor.'

'Wha? Y'mean there really is a flux capacitor?' She said in surprise, wondering if the Doctor had been a technical advisor on the film or something.

His intense blue eyes crinkled as he flashed her a playful grin. 'Nah, only joking. But it might as well be, because if I told you I was adjusting the Artron flow through the Helmic regulator to offset the resonant feedback through the Chronon Shell, you'd probably be none the wiser.'

'Fair enough,' she said, returning his smile.

'Anyway, that's all done.' He wriggled his way back to the floor opening. 'Oh, look what I've found under here. I haven't seen these for ages.' He sat up and put a pair of futuristic boots on the floor.

'Snazzy boots,' she said.

'Kinetic augmentation boots to be more accurate.'

'What do they do?' she asked as she picked one up and examined it. They looked like fibreglass ski boots.

'What it says on the tin. Power boots, they allow you to run faster and jump higher than you could normally.'

'Can I have a go?' she asked, like a child asking for a go on a swing.

'Not in here, you'd bang your head on the ceiling or run face first into the wall. I'll find us a nice open space for you to run around in.' He climbed out of the hole in the floor and started to adjust the controls on the console.

'Where are we?' asked Rose, as they stepped out onto a wide open grassy plain. She could see hills gently rolling into the distance, towards hazy mountains on the horizon.

'Er, South Dakota, Nabraska-ish,' he said as he licked his finger and held it in the air.

'America then,' Rose confirmed.

'Yeah, the Great Plains of the mid west. Plenty of room to run around. Right, let's get these on you then.'

Rose flashed him an excited smile and sat down on the grass as the Doctor fitted the boots over her trainers. He helped her to her feet and held her hands as he stood in front of her.

'Now, start off nice and slowly, get your balance and get the feel of the amplified movement.'

She tried bouncing gently on her toes, and found herself jumping three feet in the air. 'Ha hah, this is brilliant. It's like bein' on a pogo stick.'

'Good. Now not only do they amplify the movement, they dampen the deceleration as well so that you don't fall flat on your face when you stop.' Rose looked a bit doubtful. 'Okay, so let's try stepping forward then.' She took a single step and shot forward about ten feet.

She laughed and whooped as she started to run ahead faster and faster. The Doctor shook his head and smiled as he set off at a jog, following her trail of dust.

A while, and a few miles later, the Doctor caught up with her. He could see her leaping into the air, performing graceful somersaults and pirouettes. When she saw him approach, she landed and sat down, before reclining onto the grass to look at the fluffy clouds drifting overhead.

'Did I tell you I got a bronze medal for gymnastics?' she asked him as he came and lay down beside her.

'Jericho Street under seven's,' he told her.

'Oh yeah, Nestene plastic blob by the Thames,' she remembered. She stopped and listened. 'It's so peaceful here. How far are we from civilisation?'

'I'm not sure, fifty, maybe a hundred miles . . .' He stopped talking and frowned. 'Can you feel that vibration?'

'Oh yeah. What is it, an earth tremor?' she said as she sat up.

'Doubtful, it's not a geologically active area,' he told her as he stood up and looked around. 'Tell you what, jump up and have a look around.'

She crouched down and leaped 20 feet into the air. She landed gently, as if it had only been a couple of feet and jumped up again looking in another direction. She landed gently again and looked at the Doctor.

'Doctor, what year is this?'

'I'm not sure; I only looked for a wide open space. Why?'

The vibration was now a rumbling noise. 'There's some kind of black sea movin' towards us, and there are men on horseback with bows an' arrows an' spears.'

'Fantastic! It must be 19th Century or before, and they must be the indigenous natives. Blackfoot, Arapaho, Cheyenne, maybe Comanche. They must be herding the Bison.'

'That's all very interestin' an' educational, but they're herdin' them in our direction. We're gonna get trampled.'

'Ah, good point. I think we'd better get back to the TARDIS,' he said, starting to walk back the way they had come.

Rose leaped into the air again and quickly looked left and right. She could see the approaching wall of Bison, and she could see the TARDIS in the opposite direction. They were roughly equidistant.

She took one augmented step and easily caught up with the Doctor. 'How fast can a Bison run?'

'Flat out, about 40 miles an hour, why?'

'About half way to the TARDIS, we're gonna get squashed.' The rumble was now becoming a roar, and the Doctor started to run.

'Rose, you go on to the TARDIS and get inside. I'll take my chances.'

'I'm not leavin' you out here,' she told him, insulted that he would even consider that she would. 'Can't I use these boots and carry you piggy back?'

'Nice idea, but the power to weight ratio would be all wrong. It would make them ineffective. Now get out of here.' There was a cloud of dust approaching them with a roaring thunder.

'NO,' she shouted. The Doctor was sprinting now, as Rose strode beside him. 'There must be somethin' we can do,' she said and then the idea hit her. 'Three legged race!'

'What?' he asked. 'We've both got two legs,' he pointed out breathlessly.

She sat down and started to take her left boot off. 'Didn't Time Lords ever have a sports day at school? Here, put this boot on quickly.'

'Rose, what are you doing? There's a herd of angry Bison . . . Sports day?' he said with a puzzled expression as he sat down and put the boot on.

They stood up, and Rose hugged him around his waist with her left arm. 'Hold on tight, and on three, hop.'

He raised his eyebrows in understanding and gave her a proud smile. He gripped her around her waist, and she tangled her left leg around his right.

They counted together. 'One, two, three.'

They shot forward, and sailed gracefully through the air. They landed together and hopped forwards again.

'I think we're going to make it,' the Doctor declared. 'This is a first for me, hopping for my life.'

On the last hop, he got the key out of his jacket and held it ready. As they landed, the key slotted into the lock and he pushed the door open, falling with Rose through the door. They looked back and saw the enormous head of a charging bull heading towards them through the dust. He kicked the door shut, and the TARDIS rumbled and shook as the herd thundered past.

* * *

'How long have I been gone?' Rose asked as they stepped out of the TARDIS. It had parked opposite the Chinese Takeaway and the youth club.

'About twelve hours.'

'Oh. Right, I won't be long. I just want to see my mum.'

'What're you going to tell her?' he asked as he leant against the TARDIS and folded his arms.

'I don't know. I've been to the year 5 billion and only been gone, what, twelve hours? No, I'll just tell her I spent the night at Shareen's. See you later,' said Rose as she started to walk away. 'Oh.' She stopped and turned back to wave her finger at him. 'Don't you disappear.'

Rose ran off towards Bucknall House, and the Doctor wandered over to the post office and shops opposite. And then, that's when he saw the missing person poster.

'I'm back!' Rose called out as she entered the flat, dropping her keys on the hall stand. 'I was with Shareen. She was all upset again. Are you in?'

As she entered the living room, her mum came out of the kitchen with a mug of tea. 'So, what's been going on? How've you been?'

Jackie just stared at her, as though she'd seen a ghost.

'What? What's that face for? It's not the first time I've stayed out all night.'

Jackie dropped her mug of tea, smashing it on the floor. 'It's you.'

'Of course it's me,' Rose replied, wondering why her mum looked so shocked to see her.

'Oh, my God. It's you. Oh my God.' Jackie rushed forward and hugged Rose really tight. Rose looked over her shoulder at the dining table where a number of missing person posters were ready to be distributed. Rose was wondering who had gone missing when she noticed that it was her face on the posters.

The Doctor burst in through the door of the flat. 'It's not twelve hours, it's twelve months . . . You've been gone a whole year. Sorry,' he said with a sheepish smile.

* * *

'Did you think about me at all?' Jackie asked. She'd calmed down a bit, and was just grateful that Rose was back, alive and uninjured.

'I did. All the time, but . . .' Rose was still tearful that she'd upset her mum so much.

'One phone call. Just to know that you were alive.'

'I'm sorry,' Rose cried. 'I really am.'

'Do you know what terrifies me is that you still can't say. What happened to you, Rose? What can be so bad that you can't tell me, sweetheart? Where were you?' Jackie pleaded as she stroked her cheek with her hand.

Rose blinked back the tears as she looked into her mother's anguished face. What could she tell her? That she'd been to the year 5 billion? That she'd met Charles Dickens in Cardiff? She'd get a bigger slap than the Doctor for telling lies.

No, she would have to think of a story that her mum would believe; something based in fact. 'I was with the Doctor Mum. He needed help investigatin' that explosion at Henrick's'.

Jackie huffed. 'Oh he's not an insurance investigator.'

'No, he's a scientist. He . . . works as an advisor for the government,' Rose thought quickly. 'An' do you remember the dummies in the shops comin' to life? Well I helped him stop them. We were in this chamber by the Thames, but it's the official secrets act, we're not supposed to talk about it.'

'Official secrets act,' Jackie scoffed, but somehow that kind of made sense.

'I've probably said too much already. I'd better go an' check if it's all right with the Doctor. I don't want you getting' hauled away to the Tower for treason,' Rose said with a weak smile. 'You won't tell anyone, will ya?'

'My daughter, a secret agent,' Jackie said with a hint of pride in her voice. 'It'll be our secret.'

Rose hugged her mother. 'I love you Mum, and I'm really sorry.'

Jackie's anger had abated now. She nodded and kissed Rose's cheek, just so glad that she'd got her daughter back.

Rose found the Doctor lurking on the landing outside the flat, keeping out of Jackie's way. Something gave him the impression that she didn't like him, and the feeling was mutual.

'We need to talk,' she said sharply, walking towards the stairs. 'My office, now.'

'What did you tell her?' he asked tentatively as he followed her up the stairs instead of down.

'I told her you were a government scientist and that I couldn't say anythin' because of the official secrets act,' she said in an annoyed tone as they reached the door to the roof.

She couldn't see his grin behind her. 'Rose Tyler, you are brilliant! I can show her my credentials on the psychic paper if you like.'

'That'll help,' she said sarcastically. They walked onto the roof, and Rose climbed up onto a flat section of the roof. 'What happened? What went wrong? Can't we go back and fix it?'

The Doctor leaned against the roof and crossed his arms. 'I'm afraid crossing into established events is strictly forbidden.'

So that was that. Apparently, what was done was done and couldn't be undone. 'I can't tell her. I can't even begin. She's never going to forgive me,' she said, looking away from him. But then she turned her anger towards him. 'And I missed a year. Was it good?'

'Middling.'

'You're so useless.'

'Well, if it's this much trouble, are you going to stay here now?'

Rose paused in thought. That was a very good question. 'I don't know. I can't do that to her again, though.'

'Well, she's not coming with us.' There was a long pause as they both thought about Jackie Tyler meeting aliens and running amok through history. Suddenly, the tension was gone, along with the anger, and they both started laughing.

'No chance,' Rose laughed.

'I don't do families,' he said firmly.

'She slapped you!' Rose teased.

'Nine hundred years of time and space, and I've never been slapped by someone's mother.'

'Your face.' She was laughing at him now.

'It hurt!' he whined

'You're so gay.' She thought about what he had just said. 'When you say nine hundred years?'

'That's my age.'

'You're nine hundred years old?'

'Yeah.'

'My mum was right,' she nodded. 'That is one hell of an age gap.' She jumped down from the small roof and walked a few steps.

'Every conversation with you just goes mental. There's no one else I can talk to. I've seen all that stuff up there, the size of it, and I can't say a word. Aliens and spaceships and things, and I'm the only person on planet Earth who knows they exist.'

Suddenly, there was a deep horn behind her that made her flinch. A spaceship, trailing black smoke passed overhead which made them both duck, as it headed for the city. They watched as it just missed Tower Bridge, weaved around St Paul's, and then with a back-fire and a splutter, it dropped towards the Thames, taking out St Stephen's Tower. They heard Big Ben chime once as the ship dropped out of view, presumably to splash down into the Thames. The Doctor and Rose watched a plume of black smoke rise into the air on the horizon.

'Oh, that's just not fair,' Rose said.

The Doctor started laughing and grabbed Rose's hand, all the anger and awkwardness forgotten. Of course she wasn't going to stay.


	5. Chapter 5

**Chapter 5**

'Harriet Jones. Who does she think she is? Look at her, taking all the credit. Should be you on there. My daughter saved the world!' Jackie told the Member of Parliament on the TV news after the Slitheen had tried to destroy the Earth.

'I think the Doctor helped a bit,' Rose said, smiling at her mother's pride in her.

'All right, then, him too. You should be given knighthoods.'

Blimey, what a difference a day makes. It was only yesterday that she was ready to kill him for being a year late. Mind you, Rose was ready to kill him as well. She had been really upset that her Mum had thought she was dead, and that Mickey was the prime suspect.

'That's not the way he does things. No fuss. He just moves on. He's not that bad if you gave him a chance,' Rose told her, trying to build bridges. When the Slitheen crisis started, the Doctor realised that the TARDIS had overridden his temporal coordinates to bring them to this point, making them 12 months late.

'He's good in a crisis, I'll give him that,' Jackie conceded. On the phone she had asked him 'Just answer me this, is my daughter safe?' and he didn't answer, he couldn't.

But then he'd told them that he had a way out, a way to save the Earth. 'There's always been a way out' he told them.

'Then why don't we use it?' Rose asked him, and that was when Jackie realised that this strange, unearthly man really cared for her daughter.

'Because I can't guarantee your daughter will be safe' he had said over the phone, and Jackie was terrified that having lost her daughter for a year, and thinking she was dead, would get to do it all over again, only for real this time.

She had pleaded with the Doctor not to do whatever it was he was planning, even though Rose trusted him without question. It was only that Harriet Jones, pulling rank and telling him to do it that made him finally decide to launch that missile. Jackie was convinced that he wouldn't have done it on his own, not knowing if Rose would be safe.

Rose brought her out of her musings. 'Oh, now the world has changed. You're saying nice things about him.'

'Well, I reckon I've got no choice. There's no getting rid of him since you're infatuated.'

'I'm not infatuated,' Rose protested in the manner of a petulant teenager.

For her daughter's sake, Jackie was willing to hold out an 'olive branch' and try to accept this alien. 'What does he eat?'

That question took Rose by surprise. 'How do you mean?'

'I was going to do shepherds pie. All of us. A proper sit down, 'cos I'm ready to listen,' she told her. 'I wanna learn about you and him and that life you lead. Only, I don't know, he's an alien. For all I know, he eats grass and safety pins and things.'

"Who are you and what have you done with my mother?" Rose thought to herself. Had that Slitheen actually gotten her and was now wearing her like a Jackie suit? Actually, that wasn't funny; it could so easily have ended like that.

'He'll have shepherd pie. You're going to cook for him?'

'What's wrong with that?' Jackie asked indignantly.

'He's finally met his match,' Rose said jokingly.

'You're not too old for a slap, you know,' Jackie joked back as Rose's phone started ringing. 'You can go and visit your Gran tomorrow. You'd better learn some French. I told her you were in France. I said you were au-pairing.'

The caller ID said TARDIS calling when she looked at the display. 'Hello?'

'Right, I'll be a couple of hours, then we can go,' the Doctor said.

'You've got a phone?' She asked him in disbelief. She'd seen something like a phone on the console, but presumed it would be something to do with time travelling, not actually a working phone for talking to people.

'You think I can travel through space and time and I haven't got a phone? Like I said couple of hours. I've just got to send out this dispersal. There you go. That's cancelling out the Slitheen's advert in case any bargain hunters turn up.'

He heard the hesitation before she spoke. 'Er, my mother's cooking.'

Oh no, he groaned inwardly. 'Good. Put her on a slow heat and let her simmer.'

Ah, Rose thought he might be like this. 'She's cooking tea…, for us.'

Damn it, why do families have to get involved? He'd done that once, had a family, a home, and look where that got him. He could feel the storm rising in him, bringing back the memories of the end of days and his part in it.

'I don't do that,' he said sharply.

Rose could hear the emotion in his voice, and wondered why he was so upset about a simple invite to dinner. 'She wants to get to know you.'

'Tough. I've got better things to do.'

Talk about holding a grudge, I mean, it wasn't like he didn't deserve that slap. 'It's just tea,' she pleaded.

'Not to me it isn't.' "To me, it's families, relationships, being tied down to one place, losing the freedom to choose your own destiny" he thought to himself.

'She's my mother.'

Oh that hurt him. Of course Jackie was her mother, and she was a brilliant mother. She was the kind of mother who would do anything to keep her daughter safe, and he knew as well as Jackie, that he wasn't safe. 'Well, she's not mine.'

'That's not fair,' she told him, sounding hurt by his rejection of her mother's offer of friendship.

'Well, you can stay there if you want, but right now there's this plasma storm brewing in the Horse Head Nebula. Fires are burning ten million miles wide. I could fly the TARDIS right into the heart of it then ride the shock wave all the way out, hurtle right across the sky and end up anywhere . . . your choice.'

He hung up the phone and realised what he had done. After all the effort he had gone to, to get Rose to go with him in the first place, he had given her an ultimatum. She had to choose between him and her mother, and he wasn't sure which one she would choose.

He hoped it would be him, but after keeping her from her home for twelve months, and the guilt she felt for putting Jackie and Mickey through that torment…. Well, she knew where he was, it was her choice.

Jackie came out of the kitchen with two mugs of tea. 'Rose, I was thinking. I've got that bottle of Amaretto from New Year's Eve. Does he drink?' The living room was empty, so Jackie went looking for her.

She found Rose in her bedroom. 'I was wondering whether he drinks or not.' Her face fell when she saw her packing her things into a rucksack.

'Yeah, he does,' Rose said distractedly. She didn't want to confront her mother with the news that she was going again, not after what she had put her through the last time she went with the Doctor.

'Don't go, sweetheart. Please don't go.'

'Mum, don't, please. Out there I can make a difference, we can make a difference. What can I do here? I've got no job, no qualifications.'

'You've got me, an' Mickey.'

She put the rucksack over her shoulders and started to leave. 'I know Mum, an' I love you so much, an' I'm so sorry for what you went through last year. But I've seen what's out there Mum, and I've met all these wonderful people, an' not all of them were human.'

Jackie started to feel that because Rose had turned twenty, she was a young woman and didn't want to be seen living with her mother. Rose was all she had got, and she was losing her.

'I'll get a proper job. I'll work weekends. I'll pass my test, and if Jim comes round again, I'll say no. I really will,' Jackie told her as they came out of the door of the flats.

"Oh yes!" the Doctor thought as he saw Rose coming towards him wearing a rucksack.

She could see him and Mickey talking near the TARDIS. 'I'm not leaving because of you. I'm travelling, that's all, and then I'll come back.'

'But it's not safe.'

"What and the Powell Estate is?" she thought. 'Mum, if you saw it out there you'd never stay home.'

'Got enough stuff?' The Doctor asked her as she took her rucksack off.

'Last time I stepped in there, it was spur of the moment. Now I'm signing up. You're stuck with me,' she replied, stuffing the rucksack into his arms and wiggling her finger at him.

Spur of the moment? If only she knew the lengths he'd gone to, to make her change her mind after he asked her the first time and she'd said no.

She went over to Mickey. 'Come with us, there's plenty of room,' she said. She felt really bad about him being accused with her disappearance, and the reaction of his so called friends and neighbours.

'No chance,' the Doctor said. 'He's a liability; I'm not having him on board.'

'We'd be dead without him,' Rose reminded him.

Now it was his turn to feel guilty. Mickey had asked him to reject him, so that Rose wouldn't know that he wasn't ready for that lifestyle. 'My decision is final.'

'Sorry,' she said, kissing him on the lips. Mickey pretended to be disappointed.

'Good luck, yeah,' he said with a little wave.

Jackie confronted the Doctor. 'You still can't promise me. What if she gets lost? What if something happens to you, Doctor, and she's left all alone standing on some moon a million light years away. How long do I wait then?' It would be more than twelve months, that's for sure, and she wasn't sure she could take that.

'Mum, you're forgetting. It's a time machine,' Rose cut in. 'I could go travelling around suns and planets and all the way out to the edge of the universe, and by the time I get back, yeah, ten seconds would have passed. Just ten seconds. So stop worrying. See you in ten seconds' time, yeah?'

So why did they have to wait twelve months to come home, if they could have made it ten seconds? There was so much she didn't understand about this life of theirs. She hugged Rose, not really wanting to let her go, but eventually, reluctantly, she released her from the hug.

There was a rumble from within the TARDIS before it started to wheeze and fade away.

'Ten seconds,' Jackie said in resignation as she looked at her watch. She knew it was too good to be true.

In the TARDIS, the Doctor adjusted a few controls and checked the readouts as the Time Rotor pumped up and down.

'So, if I'm stayin', do I get a room or somethin'?' Rose asked, giving him a cheeky grin. 'I mean, a girl's gotta have somewhere to put all her stuff.'

Oh God, she's bringing domestic into the TARDIS. Was that the TARDIS chuckling in his head? He looked up from the console and smiled at her. 'Yeah, come on, let's get you settled in.'

He picked up her rucksack and held out his hand for her. She gave a little squeal of delight and grabbed his hand, hugging his arm in anticipation. He led her out of the console room and along a corridor, when they heard a click to their left.

'Oh, here we are then,' the Doctor said as a door swung open. 'The TARDIS has prepared a room for you.'

'What?' Rose said in amazement as she stepped through the door. She started giggling. 'This is brilliant.'

'It's alright then?' He asked her as he put the rucksack on the bed.

'Of course it is; it's my room back home.' Her face then became worried as the realisation set in. 'Hang on, how'd ya know what my room looks like? Have you been stalking me or somethin'?'

The Doctor looked horrified, because in a way, he had been stalking her . . . through time. After she said no the first time, he'd watched over her, trying to find a way that would make her say yes when he went back to ask her a second time.

'No, this is all the TARDIS's doing; she wants you to feel at home. She must really like you,' he said with a smile.

The TARDIS had dipped into her memories of her bedroom on the Powell Estate, and given her room the same colour scheme and furniture. There was an added feature to this room though, this one was tidy.

'I'll leave you to it then, and I'll see you in the kitchen when you're done.' He left the room and gently closed the door.

Rose walked over to the bed and tested the mattress; it felt better than her bed at home. 'Mmmm, I think I'm going to like it here.'

She started taking her clothes out of the rucksack and putting them in the draws and on hangers in the wardrobe. She was left with her bag of toiletries, and suddenly wondered about the bathroom arrangements on the TARDIS.

She didn't have to wonder for long, as she spotted a door in the corner of the room that wasn't present in her room on the Powell Estate. She walked around the bed and opened the door, to look into an en suite, luxury bathroom.

'Oh wow, now this is more like it,' she said out loud. The TARDIS was making her feel really welcome. She took her toiletries out of the small bag and put them on the shelf in front of the mirror over the hand basin. As she looked in the mirror, she noticed that she had an enormous smile on her face.

'Come on girl, let's go, and find the Doctor,' she said to her reflection.

Once again, she was surprised at how easily she found her way around the TARDIS; it seemed that it wasn't just her nose that led her to the kitchen. When she got there, she snorted a laugh at the vision that confronted her.

The Doctor was wearing a chef's hat and a novelty apron that made him look as though he was wearing ladies underwear.

'What?' he said with a smile. 'It's been ages since I had the chance to cook for someone.' His expression went blank as he thought about his previous companions and their food preferences.

'Whatcha cookin'?' she asked him, bringing him out of his reverie.

'Well, I know you like chips, but I thought that was a bit simple. Shepherd's pie might be a touchy subject, what with your mum offering to cook it, so the only other thing I know you like is pizza, from when Auton Mickey took you to the restaurant.'

'Oh yeah, you're a regular Sherlock Holmes, aren't ya,' she said with a smile. That was so thoughtful of him.

He grinned and waggled his eyebrows. 'You are going to love this pizza; it's an original Pizza Margherita, the recipe for which was given to me by Raffaele Esposito.'

Rose looked puzzled. 'Is he one of those celebrity chef's off the telly? I don't remember him.'

The Doctor had a real belly laugh at that. 'Raffaele was a Neapolitan pizza maker who made the first Pizza Margherita on the eleventh of June 1889, to honour the Queen consort of Italy, Margherita of Savoy.'

'You're kiddin', and you're makin' it for me?' She was really touched by how he was trying to make her feel at home.

He took the pizza out of the oven and cut it into triangular sections on the counter before placing it on the table in front of her. She reached a slice off the plate and took a bite.

'Oh my God, this is gorgeous,' she said through a mouthful of pizza. He put a glass of red wine in front of her and sat down opposite, taking his own slice and having a bite. They sat there eating and grinning at each other as they enjoyed their first meal together in the TARDIS.

'When you've finished, we've got a date with a plasma storm,' he reminded her.

'Ooh, that's a chat up line I've not heard before, I bet you say that to all the girls,' she teased.

It was a memorable and life changing meal for both of them. For Rose, it was the start of the rest of her life, a very different one to the previous nineteen years. And for the Doctor, it was an end to his self imposed solitary confinement. Not since Lucie, had he had a companion travel, eat and sleep in the TARDIS.

After the meal, they headed for the console room, and the Doctor set the coordinates for the Horse Head Nebula.

Rose looked around the room and thought about the spectacle that would be going on outside the TARDIS. 'Doctor, how are we gonna see this storm when there aren't any windows?'

'Y'know Rose, that's a very good question,' he said with a cheeky grin, 'Do you remember me telling you that the assembled hordes of Genghis Khan couldn't get through those doors?'

She nodded. 'Yeah, you said they'd tried.'

'They did, and not only can they not get in, but air can't get out. If you open those doors in thirty seconds, I think you will be pleasantly surprised.' He adjusted a few more controls and stopped the Time Rotor.

He walked over to Rose and took her hand before walking down the ramp to the doors.

'Go on then,' he prompted, and she hesitantly opened the door. She gasped at the sight that confronted her. They were riding a pressure wave of super heated gases that reminded her of that star gate sequence in the film '2001 a space odyssey', and it was breathtakingly hypnotic.

The Doctor looked down at her and smiled, enjoying her reaction to the experience, as well as the plasma storm itself.

They spent an hour zooming through the nebula, before emerging from the storm into clear space. Rose felt as though she'd been on the best fairground ride ever.

'There you are, now wasn't that better than shepherd's pie in a flat on the Powell Estate,' he said with a satisfied grin.

She bumped shoulders with him and returned the grin. 'Yeah, alright, I'll give you that one, but we promised Mum ten seconds, can we do that, just to show her that I'm all right, so she won't worry.'

'Yeah, alright. I suppose you did promise, but let's give her time to eat the shepherd's pie eh?'


	6. Chapter 6

**Chapter 6**

The Doctor and Rose stood, leaning against the console, arms and ankles crossed, grinning like idiots at the doors of the TARDIS.

'Doctor . . .? What're you doing standing inside a box?' they heard Adam call from outside. He popped his head around the door and stepped inside. 'Rose?' he asked and then froze.

The Doctor unfolded his arms and pushed down the materialise/de-materialise lever which started the Time Rotor pumping.

Adam turned a full circle, his eyes, and mouth wide open. 'Wha?' was all he managed to utter before his eyes rolled upwards and he collapsed onto the floor grating.

'Oh great,' the Doctor said sarcastically, rolling his eyes. 'This one's worse than Ricky. What is it about you and your boyfriends?' he said, giving her a cheeky smile.

'I told you, he's not my . . .' Rose started to protest in a huff. 'Mickey's my boyfriend . . . was my boyfriend . . . might still be my boyfriend.' She fell silent as the Doctor walked down the ramp.

'Well, whatever he is, he's useless.' He crouched down and pulled him up into a fireman's lift over his shoulders. Rose was surprised at how easily the Doctor lifted the unconscious Adam and slung him over his shoulder, he was stronger than he looked.

'I'll go and put him on a couch in the Medi-Bay, the TARDIS can keep an eye on him 'til he wakes up,' he said as he walked past the console.

He chuckled to himself. 'There's a baby monitor in there, so we can hear him when he wakes up, but it'll be more like a boyfriend monitor,' he said teasingly.

'Shut up,' Rose said with a grin.

After putting Adam in the Medi-Bay, they made their way to the kitchen for a cup of tea and a bite to eat.

'So is that it now, with you and the Daleks, is it really over like you said?' Rose asked as she took a sip of her tea.

The Doctor had that far away stare in his eyes. 'Yeah, it should be. The universe is a better and safer place without them, and I don't say that about many species.'

He had a sip of his tea, and hesitated before speaking again. 'About back there…, y'know, in the bunker . . . when I sealed the vault.'

Rose reached across the table and squeezed his hand. 'Hey, remember what I said? I know it wasn't your fault; you did what had to be done.'

'I know, but….'

'And I meant every word of it y'know; I wouldn't have missed any of this for the world.'

There was something else that she wanted to ask the Doctor about when she was in the vault, but didn't know how to ask. The Dalek had threatened to kill her if he didn't open the door, and although she was terrified, she told the Doctor not to do it.

'What use are emotions if you will not save the woman you love?' it had asked. What did it mean by that? Was it just trying to goad him into opening the door, or was there something else?

They were interrupted by a gasp over the boyfriend monitor (sorry, the baby monitor). 'Ugh…, it was bigger inside!' they heard Adam exclaim as he regained consciousness.

'What kind of hospital room is this? NURSE, DOCTOR?' he called out.

'That'll be us he wants,' the Doctor said. 'C'mon Nurse Tyler, let's tend to our patient.'

When they reached the Medi-Bay, Adam was sitting up on the medi-bed.

'Oh, thank God it's you,' he said. 'What happened, which hospital am I in? I had this weird hallucination that your blue box had a large, alien looking room inside it.'

'Ah, that would be neurogenic shock, brought on by a disparity of sensory inputs and a failure to rationalise what you were seeing,' the Doctor told him.

Adam had the 'dribble' expression on his face, and Rose giggled. 'He's sayin' you fainted because you couldn't believe your eyes.'

'Fainted, how embarrassing is that?'

'Yeah, I've got to say that you're the first person who's fainted when they've walked through those doors,' the Doctor told him.

'D'ya remember when you told me that you thought the United Nations were keepin' everythin' quiet about aliens, and that they really exist?' Rose asked him.

'Yeah?'

'Well, come with me,' she said, grabbing his hand, pulling him off the medi-bed and heading for the console room.

'This is the room I thought I saw in your wooden box, Doctor.'

'Yeah,' Rose said, 'and it's still there. You're inside an alien ship that's bigger on the inside.'

'No way, I don't believe it.'

Rose was laughing at the expression of disbelief on Adam's face. 'Can we go somewhere so that we can show 'im?' she asked the Doctor.

'Yeah, why not? I know just the place.' He went to the console and started up the Time Rotor.

Adam leant over and whispered in Rose's ear. 'What's happening, what's that thing moving up and down?'

'Er, it's the ship's motor…, er, we're sort of in flight,' she told him, trying to bluff her way through his questions. She didn't want him to think that she was just a clueless passenger.

She smiled at him and casually strolled around the console to stand next to the Doctor. 'Hey,' she said in a stage whisper. 'When we land, can you take me out first and tell me where we are?'

The Doctor looked down at her. 'Eh?'

Rose casually nodded at Adam. 'Y'know, so it looks like I'm a seasoned traveller an' all that.'

The Doctor raised his chin in realisation and smiled. 'Oh, I see, you want to impress Pretty Boy over there,' he whispered back.

'No,' she lied.

'Hmm, okay, no problem.'

'Thanks.'

The Doctor ran around the console, readying the TARDIS for landing. The Time Rotor stopped, and silence descended on the console room.

'Right then Adam, you wait here; while Rose and me go and check that it's safe out there. We've got a lot of experience in this sort of thing.' He smiled and winked at Rose.

They headed down the ramp and out of the doors.

'So, it's two hundred thousand, and it's a spaceship. No, wait a minute, space station, and er, go and try that gate over there. Off you go,' he said quickly.

'Two hundred thousand?' she queried.

'Two hundred thousand,' he confirmed with a smile and a waggle of his eyebrows.

'Right.' She turned and knocked on the door. 'Adam? Out you come,' she called, opening the door.

'Oh, my God,' he said, his mouth falling open.

Rose grinned. 'Don't worry, you'll get used to it.'

'Where are we?' he asked, looking around the futuristic environment.

'Good question. Let's see. So, er, judging by the architecture, I'd say we're around the year…, two hundred thousand. And if you listen….'

'Yeah.'

'Engines. We're on some sort of space station. Yeah, definitely a space station. It's a bit warm in here. They could turn the heating down. Tell you what - let's try that gate. Come on!' She led them through a metal gate, up some steps and onto a large viewing platform that looked out into the vastness of space and a beautiful blue orb below. 'Here we go! And this is…; I'll let the Doctor describe it.'

'The Fourth great and bountiful Human Empire,' the Doctor started to lecture. 'And there it is; planet Earth at its height. Covered with mega-cities, five moons, population ninety six billion. The hub of a galactic domain stretching across a million planets, a million species, with mankind right in the middle.'

This was all too much for Adam, who had another episode of neurogenic shock, brought on by a disparity of sensory inputs and a failure to rationalise what he was seeing, and promptly fainted.

'He's your boyfriend,' the Doctor said, in a matter of fact tone of voice.

Not anymore, she replied.

* * *

Rose closed the door of the TARDIS and walked up the ramp to the console, the sound of the Time Rotor started as she stood beside the Doctor.

'Did you mean what you said back there?' she asked the Doctor, who was adjusting the controls.

'Mean what?'

'That you only take the best, and you'd got me?'

He turned and smiled at her. 'I might have done, only you're not the best at choosing boyfriends, are you.'

She playfully slapped his arm. 'I told you you'd get a smack, Adam wasn't my boyfriend.' She went quiet as she thought about her actual boyfriend and how she'd left him behind. 'Is he going to be alright though, with that thing in his head?'

'Yeah, he'll just have to get used to wearing hats…, or he could grow his hair long like a hippie,' he said with a laugh, and Rose laughed with him.

'So how was that trip then?' he asked her when they'd finished laughing. 'Not too far in the future this time?'

'No, that was okay. Lots of humans, futuristic gadgets and stuff. Oh, and the planet's still there.'

He picked up on the "lots of humans" comment. She still wasn't confident with meeting aliens just yet. 'Right, so let's try a trip back to your home town, say within a generation, y'know, your grandparent's era. I know, the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley, how does that sound?'

'That would be when? Early nineteen hundreds?

'Yeah, 1920s. Pop to the wardrobe and you can dress up again.'

'Brilliant. See ya later.' She bounced on her toes, turned on her heels, and headed for the clothing emporium.

Rose looked down at herself, wondering how daft she seemed. Did they really dress like this in the 1920s – thin cotton down to the calf? And in mint green? She had found a long, dark cloak with a hood, which she dumped across the TARDIS console.

The Doctor spared her a glance. He was tapping at some meter or other. Satisfied, he nodded and moved to the next control – which was covered by Rose's cloak. A brief frown and the Doctor moved on. Rose watched his fiercely intense eyes reflecting the light of the console as he focused on the next control. She liked the way he stood so still and so confident – yet any second she knew he might break into a broad grin.

Seeming to realise he was being watched, he looked up at her again. 'What?'

'Are we nearly there yet?' she said teasingly.

'You sound like a kid on an outing.'

'I am a kid on an outing. An outing back in time.' She couldn't help smiling at the prospect, and he grinned back.

'Yeah. Great, isn't it? It's 1924 out there. Or will be in a mo.' He tapped encouragingly on a control.

'And that's when this exhibition thing is?'

'The British Empire Exhibition, yeah. Got to get a bit of culture now and then.'

Rose laughed. 'Like a school trip. Tell me again – why do I want to see it?'

He blinked in feigned disbelief. 'Because your best mate's going.'

That made her grin. 'So why doesn't he have to dress up for it?'

He was shocked now, standing back from the console and gesturing at his own clothes. Leather jacket over a dark brown round-necked shirt, faded slacks and battered shoes. 'Excuse me,' he said, pointing. 'New shirt.'

Without waiting for her verdict on the shirt, he turned to the scanner. The picture was dark, too dark to see anything at first. Then the blackness softened into shapes as the contrast and brightness adjusted.

'We could try infrared,' the Doctor muttered. 'But I don't think there's much heat out there.'

Rose could dimly make out some of the shapes now – ironwork and wooden planks; an old bedstead and a pile of buckets. 'It's cold and we're in a scrapyard.'

The Doctor shrugged, 'I like scrapyards. Never know what you might find.' He stared past the console, remembering his first trip to London with his granddaughter. It had been Foreman's Scrap Merchants at 76 Totter's Lane.

He checked another reading. 'You'll need that cloak,' he said, as if noticing it for the first time. The doors opened, and a faint trace of mist wafted in from the yard.

'Reckon we'll meet anyone famous?' Rose wondered.

'In October 1924?'

'They did have famous people then, right?'

His voice floated back from the misty outside. 'No television, but yeah they did.'

Rose hurried after him, into the excitement of the unknown.

The air was cold with a smell of damp and smog. Rose pulled the cloak tight about her and ran over to the Doctor. He was inspecting a large wooden gate, his sonic screwdriver poised over the lock, glowing busily.

'Breaking and exiting?' Rose suggested. Her breath misted the air as she spoke.

The Doctor did not look up. 'Someone's in trouble - can't you hear?'

Now that he said it, she could. In among the noise of the city – the clatter of distant wheels on cobbles, the far off sounds of people shouting and calling, the melancholy hoot of a boat on the Thames . . . Over and above that she could hear the muffled cries of someone in pain, or fear.

The sonic screwdriver hummed, and the lock clicked open. The Doctor was already kicking at the heavy gate,

sending it flying back as he hurtled through.

Fifty feet away, startled in the pale glow of a street lamp, a man was fighting for his life. His assailant was forcing him backwards, its hands round the man's neck as it bore down on him. A dark shape behind the struggling figures – all silhouette and no detail. The vague notion of a third figure disappearing back into the shadows.

The Doctor crashed shoulder-first into the attacker. Hold broken, the figure stepped back. The Doctor collapsed, clutching his shoulder, then pulled himself back to his feet. The attacker paused in the deepest shadows, deciding whether to take on the Doctor as well as its first victim.

'Doctor!' Rose ran towards them. Her appearance seemed to decide it, and the dark figure turned and marched stiffly away. Watching the figure, trying to make out some feature in the dim light,

Rose caught her foot on the kerb and went sprawling. She put out her hands to save herself, feeling the rough surface of the pavement cutting into them, rubbing away the skin. She came to rest in an undignified heap close to the man who had been attacked.

He was lying gasping on the ground, rubbing at his throat. He was wearing white gloves, but now they were stained and dirty. The Doctor leaned over and loosened the man's collar. 'Has he gone?' he asked without looking at Rose.

'Yeah. I scared him off.' She got to her feet, shrugging the cloak back over her shoulders and examining her hands – grazed, sore and covered in mud. Typical.

'I'm glad someone did.' The Doctor straightened up and rubbed his shoulder again. 'It was like running into a brick wall.'

Rose stooped to help the man on the ground. He was breathing more easily now and struggling to sit up.

'Thank you,' he croaked. 'I'm obliged.'

'You're alive,' the Doctor said. He put his hand under the man's elbow and helped him up.

'Who was that?' Rose asked. 'Why did he attack you?'

'I have no idea, miss. I heard a noise, saw lights. I came to see what it was and . . .' He shrugged, still rubbing at his neck.

'Here, let's see.' The Doctor led him a few steps down the pavement so they were directly under the street light. He gestured for the man to raise his head. 'It's all right, I'm a doctor.'

'Just not a medical one,' Rose pointed out, earning a glare. 'So, is he OK?'

'Dickson, miss.'

'Mr Dickson will be fine,' the Doctor said. 'Lucky we got here when we did, though. Where do you live?'

'I am in service, sir, at the house over there.' Dickson pointed to a large town house further down the street. Rose could see that the side door was open and light was spilling out down the steps.

'Then let's get you back there.' The Doctor stepped away, looking Dickson up and down. He frowned and reached for the man's hand, lifted it gently in his own to examine it in the light. Apparently satisfied, he smiled, let the hand go, gestured for Dickson to lead the way. He took Dickson's arm to help him.

'What is it?' Rose asked quietly.

'You keep your gloves clean, Mr Dickson?'

'Of course, sir.' He still sounded hoarse, his voice scraping in his throat. 'Why?'

'Just they're a bit grubby now, after your little adventure. Another mystery.'

'To go with "who?" and "why?",' Rose said.

'To go with the fact that the marks on Mr Dickson's neck look like they were made by a metal implement, not fingers,' the Doctor said. 'And that his gloves are stained with oil.'

From the darkest part of the shadowy evening, two figures watched the Doctor and Rose help Dickson back to the house. One of them gave a sigh of disappointment. The other had no breath with which to sigh.


	7. Chapter 7

**Chapter 7**

The Doctor had managed to take Rose to the British Empire Exhibition, the day after they arrived.

It was a Tuesday, and it was massive: a city of classical buildings fashioned from grey concrete. A size and scale and sense of optimism that put the Millennium Dome to shame. Each and every country and dominion and colony of the British Empire had been represented, some with their own vast concrete pavilions, some sharing with others.

It was both boring and fascinating in equal measure. Whenever they got tired of one thing, they simply moved on until something else caught their interest. They seemed to walk for miles. By late afternoon, as the light was fading and the crowds were thinning, Rose found it hard to distinguish between the different pavilions and exhibitions.

They had been staying at the posh, opulent, Imperial Club, due to the fact that someone had the stolen TARDIS. As usual, a quiet day out had turned into a busy few days putting the world to rights.

The poshness of the Imperial Club had been reduced somewhat by having the front door kicked in by clockwork suits of armour. They were alien robots, disguised and undetectable due to their clockwork construction.

And the aliens themselves, Katurians, hiding as humans. One of them a ruthless, psychopathic despot called Shade Vassily, exiled on Earth in disgrace. Another was a decoy, along with his jailer. And finally there had been the zealous revolutionary, hell bent on revenge for a slaughtered family.

The clockwork robots had killed people when trying to get information about Vassily, and the revolutionary found it regrettable but necessary to find the dangerous psychopath. Rose could see no difference between them. People had been killed, and the only thing that was different was their justification for doing it.

Little did she know that someone close to her had killed billions to save the entire population of the universe. How would she feel about that if she knew the truth?

'I shall miss this strange planet with its ugly-looking people,' The Katurian confessed as she and the Doctor shook hands on the Embankment.

'They won't all miss you.'

She inclined her head, perhaps in sorrow. 'Vassily is dead,' she said quietly, 'and I have destroyed his body. I have succeeded, but it was not worth the cost.'

Rose and Vassily's decoy watched from the other side of the road. The three of them stood together a few minutes later, watching as the surface of the Thames seemed to heave upwards.

The slick, dark shape of the Katurian ship detached itself from the water and lifted soundlessly into the night sky. It paused over their heads, as if bidding farewell, then with a streak of impossibly bright light it was gone.

'One more job to do,' the Doctor said. They walked to Sir George's house in silence. Sir George Harding had shown them kindness when they first arrived in 1924 when the TARDIS had been taken by the Katurian revolutionary.

Sir George's wife, Anna – or Anastasia – was a cousin of Tsar Nicholas II and also related to Queen Victoria. Rose had befriended their young son Freddy, and had taken quite a shine to him.

The Doctor let Rose do the talking, as she explained how Freddy had helped them to save London from an incineration by ignited ozone. Sir George sat silently listening, his hands clasped tightly in his lap and his face pale as death.

'He was a hero,' Rose said. 'He really was. He saved us all, several times. He was so . . .' She couldn't think of the words and looked away. Brave didn't even start to describe the actions he'd taken, especially when she realised he had the Romanov's inherited haemophilia.

Freddy had scratched his leg climbing through a window in to St Stevens Tower. Rose was being held hostage by Vassily, who was planning to use Big Ben to power his escape ship. The scratch wouldn't stop bleeding.

Sir George leaned forward and put his hand over Rose's. 'Yes, he was. Such enthusiasm, such love of life. Such a willingness to help. Always wanting to help – in the house, the garden, the kitchen.' He smiled sadly. 'Drives his mother potty, you know. No wonder she worries about him so.'

'She will be all right?' Rose asked quietly.

Sir George nodded. 'I'm sure she will. She's very strong, you know. But she's been through a lot in her life. Like Freddie.' They had escaped the Russian revolution, but Freddy's real father had been killed creating a diversion, so his family could escape.

'I'm sorry,' the Doctor said quietly. It was the first time he had spoken since they arrived.

'That's all right, Doctor,' Sir George said. 'We'll be fine now. And you never know . . .' He stood up and shook the Doctor's hand. 'It might have shocked some sense into the boy.' He smiled weakly. The smile turned to a look of surprise as Rose hugged him tight. 'I say, steady on.'

There were tears on her cheeks when she stepped away. 'Give Freddie our love, won't you. And Anna. He may not remember that we said goodbye.'

'Indeed I will.' Sir George glanced upwards as he spoke.

And in the room above, a mother sat on her son's bed, holding his pale, cold hand. She cried soundless tears. Tears of relief and joy as she felt every weak rhythm of his pulse. Tears that became sobs as he opened his eyes, and managed to smile. Then his eyes closed again and he slept on peacefully – dreaming of clocks and cats and cogwheels. And of how he had been a hero.

The reassuring blue shape of the TARDIS was standing at the back of the Katurian revolutionary's house, just as she had promised.

'I'm surprised you trusted her,' Rose said.

The Doctor clicked his tongue. 'You've no faith.' He turned to Vassily's decoy. 'Goodbye, then.'

The Katurian reached out to shake first the Doctor's hand, then Rose's.

'I like the new arm,' she said. 'And thanks. You know.' She held on to his hand for a moment. It was like the gauntlet of a medieval armoured knight. The fingers were jointed metal; the hand was stiff and cold. His arm was plain gunmetal, attached – expertly, the Doctor claimed proudly – to the shoulder.

Except that Rose couldn't see the arm, because it was hidden beneath a new coat. A battered brown leather jacket.

'It's no good to me,' the Doctor had sighed. 'Stitching's coming apart.'

When she let go, he lifted up his hand in front of his face, inspecting it. Behind his expressionless face Rose knew was a mass of cogs and gears and sprockets. It was hard to believe. He seemed so ordinary. So human.

'I don't think the previous owner will be needing the arm back,' the Doctor reassured him. 'Sorry it's not more in keeping.'

'Thank you, Doctor.' He flexed his fingers, then let the arm drop to his side. 'It reminds me of who I really am.'

'The Al's gone,' the Doctor said. 'Burned out and disintegrated. So there's nothing to stop you leaving, assuming there ever really was. We can give you a lift, if you want,' he offered.

'Where to? This is the only home I have.'

The Doctor nodded. 'See you then.'

'You'll do all right,' Rose said. 'Hey, if you're still around in eighty years or so, come and visit me.'

'Thank you. Perhaps I will.' He stepped back, and surprised Rose by snapping a salute.

'Don't get lonely,' she said, waving her fingers at him and smiling.

The Doctor opened the door of the TARDIS, and she followed him inside. They walked up the ramp to the console, and the Doctor adjusted a few controls to start the Time Rotor pumping up and down.

'So, when you were trying to entice me into this box, you said that I could go anywhere,' she reminded him.

'Yeah, that's right, you can.'

'Well, what about an alien planet then? Y'know with weird life forms an' everythin', so I can put my feet on alien soil.' She had met so many aliens now, that she felt it was about time she saw where they lived.

The Doctor grinned at her. 'What, one small step for man, one giant leap for Rose Tyler? Right then, if its aliens the lady wants, then its aliens the lady gets. Go and get changed into something more appropriate, and I'll see what I can do.'

Rose flashed him an excited grin, and headed out of the console room. He sauntered out after her to change his shirt for his black jumper, and find a new leather jacket. He returned a short while later, with Rose arriving a few minutes after that.

He gave her THAT grin and twiddled a couple of knobs. 'Spatial coordinates set for…, anywhere but here.' He adjusted a few more controls. 'Temporal coordinates set for…, anytime but the present. Hold tight Rose Tyler, you're about to boldly go where no one has gone before.'

He started the Time Rotor, and it started to pump up and down with its familiar wheezing grind, until there was a 'thump' as the TARDIS unexpectedly landed, and the Time Rotor stopped.

The Doctor thought that it was a bit odd that the TARDIS had landed so soon, without him preparing it for landing. It was as though the TARDIS was eager to land, or something was eager for them to land.

Rose was already at the doors and had opened them wide. Wherever it was, it definitely wasn't Earth, not with that shimmering green sky, oh, and the three suns kind of gave it away as well.

The muddy ground was an olive green colour, and sloped up sharply, partially obscuring a range of pale, pyramidal mountains, which stood like pitched tents on the horizon.

She had an enormous grin on her face as she realised that it wasn't Earth. She was…, Somewhere Else, another world, this was proper alien this was.

She closed her eyes, opened her arms, and leaned out slightly. She felt giddy for a moment as a gentle breeze blew up and ruffled her blonde hair about her shoulders.

'You did it then,' she called back to the Doctor.

'Huh?' he said, preoccupied with the TARDIS's unexpected landing. He looked up and saw her looking out of the doors. 'Oh, yeah, right, the alien planet thing. And about time, we've done space stations…, space ships…; we've done your planet so often we should get T-shirts made up.'

Rose heard him walking down the ramp to join her and smiled to herself. 'What, you mean like, 'I saved the Earth and all I got was'….'

'Aggro?'

He gave her a gentle shove in the small of her back and she stumbled outside. The alien soil squidged beneath her white trainers.

'Oi, Doctor, I was building up to that!'

He just grinned at her. 'What were you gonna do, plant a flag?' Make a speech?' He stepped out after her, looking all about.

'Nah, take a giant leap for humankind, and nine times out of ten you squash whatever's beneath you. The best things are always just stumbled upon.'

'The way you stumbled on me, you mean?' she asked cheekily.

'Look,'' he said softly, pointing to something just the other side of the TARDIS. A single flower. Rose went over to see. It was a scraggly specimen, but smelled sweet, and its red petals were the only splats of colour in the muddy desert.

'There you go,'' the Doctor murmured. 'Your first contact with alien life on its own turf . . . literally.'

* * *

Rose emerged from underneath the surface of the hot, fragrant, bubbly water, letting out a contented sigh. The bath in her en suite was larger than the one at home, and she made full use of it.

She was trying to wash the dirt, grime, and memory of the Justica system from her. If she never saw a Slitheen again, it would still be too soon. Only this lot hadn't been Slitheen, they'd been another family, the Blathereen, and they were just as bad.

She'd thought being hunted through 10 Downing Street, and then blown up by a cruise missile was bad, but being stuck in prison with them with no where to run, well . . . She shivered at the thought of what could have happened, and very nearly did.

And back home, her Mum and Mickey had been hunted at Mickey's flat. The bastards, nobody messes with her mum and gets away with it. Where had the Doctor said they were from? Rats a comical tally porous? Bloody stupid name if you asked her.

She let the memories and the stress float away, just as she was floating in the bath, her toes just touching the tap end as her head just touched the other. Her hair floated out, forming a halo around her head.

She had been luxuriating for about an hour now, and noticed that her fingers were starting to go wrinkly. 'Time to call it a night then,' she said to herself, and climbed out of the bath and then realised that she had made an oversight when packing her rucksack.

'Oh bugger, I forgot to pack a bath towel,' she said to herself as she reached for the small hand towel on the rail by the basin. She didn't have to worry though, as she stepped out of the bath, jets of warm air started to caress her wet body. She laughed at the tickling sensation, and held her arms out to get the full effect, rubbing her hair occasionally to get the last bit of moisture out.

When she was dry, she put her pyjamas on and went to make a bedtime drink of hot chocolate, and say goodnight to the Doctor, who, it turned out, was in the kitchen already eating a sandwich.

'Feeling better now?' he asked her as she reached her mug from the drainer on the sink.

'A hundred percent thanks. And if I ask to go an' visit an alien planet again, just slap me,' she said with a smile.

'Oh, don't let one bad experience put you off; there are millions of worlds out there that are really great.'

Rose finished making her hot chocolate and took a sip. Okay then, next time make it somewhere less Alcatraz, and more Alicante, eh?'

'I know just the place, goodnight.'

Rose shuffled to the door in her slippers. 'Goodnight,' she said with a yawn over her shoulder as she headed back to her room.

When she was incarcerated on Justice Beta, Rose had not slept well. The mattress was thin, lumpy and smelt musty, and the blanket was thin and also smelt musty. Add to that the fear of being attacked in your sleep, and you had the recipe for serious sleep deprivation, so, that night, after her long soak in the tub, and a relaxing drink of hot chocolate, Rose slept like the proverbial log.


	8. Chapter 8

**Chapter 8**

As Rose slept, she dreamt of suns expanding and planets crumbling, snow covered streets from Christmas's long gone. She saw her Mum unzip her forehead, and a Slitheen stepped out of her skin. She turned to run and bumped into an oversized pepper pot hell bent on killing everyone, full of rage and hate. She grappled with it and pulled its top off. She peeked inside, expecting to see the tentacled mutant inside, but instead, she saw the Doctor sitting there, crying like a baby.

['I'm not a Dalek, I'm not. I'm nothing like a Dalek,'] he said.

"Am I having a nightmare?" she thought to herself, and then felt the warm gentle hum of the TARDIS inside her and her breathing slowed. The fear and sadness of the dream left her, and she looked up from the Dalek. She was with Gwyneth in the pantry, talking with her.

['Your dad's up here waiting for you, Miss.']

['Who told you he was dead?']

['Don't be silly Miss, if he was dead, how would I be able to see him?']

['My father died years back.']

['But you've been thinking about him lately more than ever.']

The pantry was no longer the pantry; it was the hallway of her flat back home, only it looked bigger. "Ah, that's because I'm little", she reasoned. She pushed open the door to her mother's bedroom and saw her sitting crossed legged on the bed, looking at a photograph album with a sad, wistful expression. Jackie saw her and smiled. ['Come here, Rose. Come here.']

Rose climbed up on the bed and sat next to her Mother, looking up at her smiling face. Her lips were smiling, but there was a haunting sadness to her eyes still.

['Who's that?'] She asked, pointing to the picture of a man grinning at the camera. She was about to tell her who it was, when Jackie started speaking again. ['It's your daddy. You weren't old enough to remember when he died. 1987, 7th of November. Do you remember what I told you? The day that Stuart Hoskins and Sarah Clarke got married. He was always having adventures. Oh, he would have loved to have seen you now.']

Rose couldn't speak, she just sat there, mesmerised by the photograph of her father.

['I wasn't there…, nobody was. It was a hit and run driver. Never found out who . . . He was dead when the ambulance got there. I only wish there'd been someone there for him.']

While Rose was transfixed by the photograph, Jackie's voice took on a sing-song quality, as though she were speaking with a Welsh accent. ['The driver was just a kid, he stopped . . . he waited for the police. It wasn't his fault. For some reason, Pete just ran out. People say there was this girl, and she sat with Pete while he was dying. She held his hand. Then she was gone. Never found out who she was.']

'Hmmmm.' Rose stretched and yawned, looking at the red, box like numbers on her clock. The TARDIS had even gotten the same bedside clock for her; that was so sweet. 07:47 it said, as she peeped at it through one half open eye.

She had no memory of her nightmare, which had been soothed away by the TARDIS, but there was one memory, the memory of sitting with her mother and looking at photographs of her father.

She longed to meet her father, to see that smile for real, just to hug him and be hugged. She wondered why the Doctor didn't do that with his people, surely he could just hop back in the TARDIS and say hello.

Maybe it was too painful, knowing what was going to happen to them and having to smile instead of cry. That was something she would have to ask him when the time and the mood were right.

She got out of bed and headed to the en suite for a pee and a shower. The shower was a walk in room with water jets squirting in all directions, it was refreshing, and exhilarating as she rubbed the shower gel into her hair and over her body.

After drying off in the air jets, she went through to the bedroom and started to dress, choosing blue denim jeans with white trainers, white vest top, pink hoodie, and a denim jacket. She then sat at the dressing table and started to brush her hair and put it up on her head with a butterfly shaped clip. After a little makeup and lippy, she felt ready to face the universe.

As she made her way down the corridor from her room, she could smell toast coming from the kitchen.

"Ooh, that smells lovely," she said to the Doctor as she walked in.

He was sitting at the table, grinning at her. "Good morning, there's toast in the toast rack, with butter or marmalade. Cereals in the cupboard, with milk in the fridge. There's tea in the pot and orange juice in the jug, help yourself."

"Mornin', someone was up early," she said, sitting at the table and helping herself to a slice of toast and reaching for the butter. She poured some orange juice out of the jug into a glass.

"Or late," he replied. "Time Lords don't need much sleep."

"Really? I never realised. That must have been a bit boring for you while I was asleep."

"Nah, there's plenty to tinker with in the TARDIS, for instance, I've set the lights to brighten and dim on a daily cycle to help you keep track of what time of day it is."

"Oh, that's great, thank you."

"And did you sleep well?"

"Oh yeah, best nights sleep for ages. That mattress is SO comfortable, and the room was at just the right temperature, it was brilliant."

"That's the TARDIS, I told you she likes you," he said as he finished a slice of toast.

"An' I had a dream, y'know, one of those really vivid dreams. Well, actually, it was more like relivin' a memory."

"Really, a good one or a bad one?" he asked her.

"A bit of both to be honest." She proceeded to tell him about how, three times a year; her mum would pour a drink and get out the photographs of her dad.

They finished breakfast, and walked through to the console room as Rose finished telling him about Pete Tyler.

"She wasn't there for him…, nobody was. It was a hit and run driver, an' Dad was dead when the ambulance got there. She wished there'd been someone there for him, that's what Mum always says. So I was thinking, could we, could we go and see my dad when he was still alive?"

"Where's this come from, all of a sudden?" Although he knew only too well that dreams could leave powerful emotions on the waking consciousness.

"All right then, if we can't, if it goes against the laws of time or something, then never mind, just leave it."

"No, I can do anything. I'm just more worried about you."

"I want to see him."

"Your wish is my command. But be careful what you wish for."

* * *

The Doctor and Rose walked up the ramp together hand in hand to the console. Rose's bottom lip started to quiver as she tried to hold back the tears.

'Hey, hey, it's alright,' he said as he looked down at her and saw her starting to cry.

'I'm sorry,' she cried, 'I'm really sorry.'

He reached out and hugged her. 'I know, and I accepted your apology, didn't I? And now it's my turn to say sorry.'

'You, what've you got to say sorry for?'

'For not explaining it better, for letting you put your entire existence in jeopardy. You asked me about killing your grandfather; I should have told you that the reverse can be just as bad.'

He released her from the hug and put an arm around her shoulder. 'Let's go to the living room and we can talk about it.'

They sat on the plush sofa, and he held her hand as he looked into her tear streaked eyes. 'How can I explain it so that you'll understand it?' he asked himself.

'It's like building a house of cards, have you ever done that?'

'Yeah, of course…, not since I was a kid though.'

'Well I think it's time you did it again.' He reached over to the coffee table in front of the sofa and picked up the deck of cards that were lying there.

'The first card is your mum,' he said as he picked the card off the top of the deck. 'Queen of spades. Oh please, don't give her a spade, she'd only hit me with it.' Rose let out a giggle.

'Now where's your dad's card? There we are . . . king of hearts.' He took the two cards and stood them together to form a pyramid. 'Now you . . . ace of diamonds, and this next card is you being born . . .'

He stood those two cards together and started to build the base of the pyramid of cards. 'Your first full nappy, your first smile.' He paused for a moment as he picked up the ace of spades. 'Six months into your life, the death card. This is your dad's death.' Rose blinked back the tears that were welling in her eyes.

He carried on building the pyramid, each card having a significance in her life, until he reached the top. 'And finally, you reach the end.' He smiled at her. 'All as it should be. Now, take out the ace of spades on the bottom row.'

Rose reached forwards, and ever so carefully tried to remove her father's death card from the base of the pyramid. She'd nearly got the card out when the support above it gave way and the whole pyramid collapse.

Rose started to see what he was getting at. 'Is that what was happenin' in the church? Did I knock the house of cards down?'

'Yeah, your dad was the king of hearts on the bottom layer, and you tried to take his death out of the pyramid.'

She could feel the tears coming again, and he cupped her cheek in his hand and wiped a tear away with his thumb. 'Your dad was a very brave man, he put himself back in the deck to keep the cards from tumbling down, you should be very proud of him.'

'I am,' she squeaked through a single sob. 'An' I got to hug him, and it felt so good, all those years growin' up, I just wanted him there so he could hug me, an' now he has.'

Come here, he said, holding out his arms in invitation. She fell into his arms, and he rocked her in a hug as she wept for her father. They sat there for a long while in silence, the Doctor resting his chin on the top of her head, patting and rubbing her back until she was all cried out.

Having cried out her grief, she started to think of the positive things that she had gotten from meeting her father, and remembered, no, treasured the conversation she'd had with him.

['I was never there for you.']

['You would have been.']

['But I can do this for you. I can be a proper dad to you now.']

['But it's not fair.']

['I've had all these extra hours. No one else in the world has ever had that. And on top of that, I got to see you. And you're beautiful. How lucky am I, eh? So, come on, do as your dad says. You going to be there for me, love . . .? Thanks for saving me.']

When she had finished crying, the Doctor gently and tenderly kissed the top of her head. They had shared something in that tender embrace, a mutual grief for people they had lost, but also a deepening of their friendship and the start of an unspoken love.

She looked up and smiled at him. 'Thanks for that, you were right again when you said 'be careful what you wish for'.'

'Hey, I'm always right, me,' he said cheekily.

'You wish,' she shot back with a weak smile.

'So, what do you want to see next then?' he asked her, as he stood up, holding his hand out for her.

She took his hand and pulled herself up off the sofa. 'I don't know; whatcha think?'

'Oh, I know, seeing you there, crying, it's reminded me of this planet. C'mon, to the wardrobe,' he said like Bruce Wayne saying 'to the bat poles'.

The Doctor went up the spiral staircase to the upper gallery, while Rose stayed on the lower level.

'So what kind of outfit am I lookin' for?' she called out.

'Something for cold weather, should be in the fourth section, they go Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter, quite logical really,' he called back from the gallery above.

'Oh yeah, that's clever. Oh, by the way, you'll have to stop callin' this a wardrobe, 'clothing department', or 'emporium', would be more like it.' She started perusing the myriad of winter clothes.

'How cold?' she asked.

'Very, think Arctic, polar explorer.'

'Blimey, an' you think I'm gonna enjoy this?'

'Trust me; you're going to love it.'

They both emerged from the wardrobe (department, emporium) dressed like Inuit Eskimos, covered head to toe in fur. They immediately burst into fits of laughter. The Doctor couldn't help but admire Rose's face; it was beautifully framed by the fur around the hood, accentuating her gorgeous smile and hazel eyes.

'Is this real fur?' she asked him, she had a thing about wearing fur for fashion.

'Yeah, ecologically resourced by the Sámi, the indigenous Finno-Ugric people inhabiting the Arctic area of Norway, Sweden, and Finland.'

'Oh . . . okay.' She lowered the hood as they headed for the console room. 'I'm boilin' in this.'

'Don't worry, when we get outside you'll be really comfortable.'

'And where is it we're goin'?'

'Hang on, I'll show you.' He de-materialised the TARDIS and activated the view screen. 'There we are, Woman Wept.'

'Eh?'

'That's the name of the planet, Woman Wept.'

'What an unusual name, why is it called that?'

'Here, look, when the first explorer's came through this system, they saw this continent.' Rose stood beside him and looked at the view of the planet below.

'What continent?' she asked him in confusion.

'Ah, hang on; I'll just rotate the view.' The image on the screen started to turn, and suddenly, like a Rorschach inkblot test, Rose could see the shape of a woman with her head bowed forward, with a peninsula, shaped like a forearm and hand in front of her face.

'There you are, a woman lamenting,' he said with a smile as he saw the recognition in her eyes.

'Lamentin', isn't that some sort of song?' she asked.

'That's a lament, but 'to lament' is to express passionate grief about something,' he told her as he started the Time Rotor.

'Oh.'

The Time Rotor stopped and he shut down the console. 'Come on then, let's go see,' he said, pulling up the hood and holding out his mittened hand for her. She pulled her own hood up, and mitten in mitten, they walked down the ramp.

He stepped out of the TARDIS and turned to face her as she stepped onto the snow covered ground. She looked out on the scene of magnificent desolation, it was midnight, and the landscape was illuminated by an eerie twilight from the moons above.

She could feel the cold prickling her cheeks, and saw snakes of ice dust drifting off into the distance, where the horizon blended with the sky. 'Blimey', she panted, 'this cold takes your breath away.' Her breath creating puffs of steam as she spoke.

'Couldn't we have seen this at the north or south pole on Earth?'

'This beach, yeah, but that ocean, that's something else,' he said with a grin, waggling his eyebrows and nodding behind her.

'Beach?' she started to ask as she looked behind her for the first time.

'Oh . . . My . . . God!'

There was a curved cliff of ice, over a hundred feet tall, crested with snow. Rose's eyes followed the wall up as it curved over them, and nearly fell backwards as she saw the leading edge of the frozen wave with snow blowing off the top of it.

The Doctor came and stood beside her. 'There was an enormous coronal mass ejection that caused the star to cool down. It disrupted the weather patterns and caused a sudden drop in air pressure that sucked super cooled air from the troposphere. The whole ocean froze in an instant.'

'Ooh, I love it when you talk dirty,' she teased.

He laughed and lowered the hood on his fur coat. 'Brrrr, minus thirty-ish I'd say. Lower your hood and listen,' he said.

Rose lowered her hood, and felt the cold around her ears. Apart from a faint hissing sound as ice crystals rode the ice dunes, it was silent, really silent; the silence that comes from a planet with no other life forms on it.

The Doctor had moved quietly behind her unnoticed, and she turned to look at him. 'It's so peac . . .'

SPLAT! A soft snowball hit her in the face.

'Oi!' she said in surprise. 'Right, now you're for it.' She stooped down and scooped up a handful of snow with her mittens, forming it into a ball. She launched it at him, and he just managed to dodge out of the way.

'Rubbish,' he taunted. 'That was a proper girly throw that was.'

'Ooh, you are SO for it now,' she said with a grin as he launched another salvo at her. There was a furious exchange of frozen artillery, accompanied by fits of uncontrollable laughter carrying across the silent landscape.

Before long, Rose was out of breath, and her lungs were burning with the cold, both of them were filling the air with a fog of warm breath.

'Well,' she gasped, 'not such a girly throw now, is it?'

He gave a single laugh. 'I have to admit,' [pant] 'that my initial assessment,' [gasp] 'based on that one throw, may have been a little hasty.'

'Hah! Is that the Time Lord admitting that he's not always right?' she teased. His speed took her by surprise as he scooped her up and carried her in his arms. She squealed with laughter as she held on around his neck.

'I told you I'm always right,' he said, as he easily threw her through the air and into a snow drift, where she disappeared in a cloud of snow.

Arms and legs wind milled, until her head popped up out of the Rose shaped hole in the snow, with an enormous grin on her face.

'You do realise that there'll be payback for that,' she said as she held out her hand. 'C'mon, help me up.'

He leaned forward, grabbed her hand, and started to pull her to her feet. Halfway to her feet, she deliberately dropped her weight and pulled him off balance. He fell forwards on top of her and ate snow.

'Plah!' He spat out a mouthful of snow. 'Brrrr, that's cold,' he laughed, and then they both just stopped and looked at each other. He looked down into those sparkling, hazel eyes that appeared darker in the moonlight. She lay there under him; aware of his body on top of her, his eyes seemed to glow with an electric blue as they caught the reflected light off the snow.

'What use are emotions if you will not save the woman you love?' she heard in her head again. As quickly as the moment had arrived, it had passed.

'Er, we'd better think about getting back on board before we freeze out here,' he told her, slightly self conscious of where he was and what he was doing.

At the moment, Rose wouldn't mind freezing where she was, and with who was on top of her, but the moment had passed, and she was starting to feel the cold.

'Thanks for this,' she said seriously. 'Acting like a kid again was just what I needed.'

'Just what the Doctor ordered,' he joked as he climbed off her and pulled her to her feet. He put an arm around her shoulders, and she hugged him around the middle as they sauntered back to the TARDIS.


	9. Chapter 9

**Chapter 9**

That night, while Rose slept, the Doctor stood at the console, watching the green cylinder of the Time Rotor pump up and down. He thought about her grief at seeing her father run over outside the church, and how he failed save him. He'd tried, but time wouldn't let him.

He thought about the Katurian dictator, Shade Vassily and all the people he had killed. He thought about the Katurian revolutionary who had accused the Doctor of being that mass murderer. Was his past that obvious?

That made him think about the Dalek in van Statten's bunker, how he had wanted to kill it, destroy it, eradicate it from existence. But Rose had a different view of things.

['It couldn't kill van Statten, it couldn't kill me. It's changing. What about you, Doctor? What the hell are you changing into?']

She was right of course. He was becoming that which he most despised.

['The Daleks have failed! Why don't you finish the job and make the Daleks extinct. Rid the Universe of your filth. Why don't you just die?']

['You would make a good Dalek.']

His intense blue eyes stared at the Time Rotor as finally, he thought about the end of days on Gallifrey, the old barn where he had done it… where he had ended the war. His memory was sketchy at best on the events of that day. A long walk; he remembered walking for miles and miles. "No more!" the mantra he chanted to himself as he walked. There was a big, red button.

'Then that's your punishment. If you do this, if you kill them all, then that's the consequence. You live. Gallifrey . . . You're going to burn it, and all those Daleks with it, but all those children too. How many children on Gallifrey right now?' he heard Rose say behind him.

Puzzled, he turned around, but she wasn't there. She was fast asleep in her room. He frowned as he thought about what he'd heard. It was Rose's voice, but she'd spoken without her London accent. It was a typical Rose question, but how could she ask it? She had no idea what he had done that day.

He moved around the console to the monitor, and started typing. Concentric circles and lines appeared on the screen, the written language of the Time Lords.

"Galactic demographic database. Begin search."

He typed "Kasterborus 10-0-11-00:02 from Galactic Zero Centre", and then "Gallifrey".

A stream of data scrolled down the screen, showing the gross statistics of his home planet. Cold, impersonal data that told him nothing. He selected Capitol from the displayed list of all the cities on Gallifrey, and the specific data for Gallifrey's capitol city appeared. He saw what he was looking for. "Population – 8,406,000".

With trembling hands, he typed "Narrow parameter. Number of children?" Tears stung his eyes as he read the result. "Children - 280,201".

He selected another. "Arcadia: Children - 229,015", and another. "Old Harbour: Children - 109,201". City by city, town by town, village by village, he counted through the night, keeping a running total in his head. By early morning, he had his answer, 2,470,000,000.

When Rose wandered into the console room later that morning, the Doctor had his arms crossed and was leaning with his back against a wall, staring across at the hexagonal console in the centre of the room, on which a myriad of lights flickered and sparkled. His face shone green in the glow from the Time Rotor, which indicated that they were in flight.

Rose didn't know where they were going, but perhaps the Doctor could tell from observing these things exactly where in the universe the time-and-space machine was taking them.

'I thought I'd better call home,' she said, waving her phone at the Doctor.

He nodded at her, his thoughts drifting to his home light years away, on a planet that no longer existed. A planet where the terrified screams of 2,470,000,000 children echoed in his memories.

She felt slightly cheated, having geared herself up for – well, not an argument, just that flicker of displeasure that occasionally crossed his face when she mentioned family, or more specifically, when she mentioned her mum.

Not this morning though. This morning he envied her the family she had, be it ever so small, it was still a family… her family.

She pushed a bit further, unaware of the penance he had paid during the night. 'It's just that my mum'll worry. You know that my mum'll worry. And I did promise. Sort of.'

He nodded again. 'And you think she'll worry less if you tell her you've been out facing aliens but at the moment you're just spinning through the space-time vortex.'

Rose frowned. He seemed a bit subdued this morning, as though he had something on his mind. She knew there was no point asking, he would never tell her if there was.

'She'll worry less if she thinks I'm not dead!' she said with a smirk.

The Doctor – her best friend, the Doctor, who outwardly seemed to be a striking, forty-ish human with a soft northern accent, but was, she knew, actually a 900-year-old alien from some galaxy far, far away – could be a bit dismissive of her mum's worries sometimes.

She wasn't sure if it was something to do with not being human, or just something to do with being the Doctor. She didn't even know if he'd ever had a mum of his own. If you didn't understand mums in general, there was no way you'd get Jackie Tyler.

'I'll just give her a quick call. Well, I say quick, she'll keep me on for hours, wantin' to know everythin' – she can talk for England, my mum can. Hope you weren't plannin' to stop off at any planets this mornin'.'

His mood lifted as Rose joked about her mother. After all, there was no point moping about something that was time locked and unchangeable, no matter how horrific it was. He switched on his grin. 'My planet-hopping can wait till this afternoon.'

She smiled back, and pressed the speed-dial button that called her mum. She just had to accept that, through the Doctor's genius, her ordinary mobile could now transcend space and time; if she thought about it too much her mind began to feel like it was overheating.

The phone rang six times before it was picked up, which surprised Rose. Her mum loved nothing better than a good old natter, and the phone was usually snatched up when it had barely got out its first brring.

'Hiya, Mum.' she said.

The voice at the other end was exuberant. 'Rose! What are you doin'? Where are ya?' Then a slight pause. 'Are you still with 'IM?'

Rose smiled. 'I'm just hangin' around in the time machine. And yeah, I'm still with him.'

The Doctor looked up at this and did a sarky wave that she knew was directed at Jackie. Rose waved back happily. 'Mum says hi,' she said, with her hand over the phone.

'And are you plannin' on coming home any time soon?' Jackie was saying. 'Everyone misses you. Mickey misses you. I miss you. You know, one of these days you'll decide to come home and it'll be too late, I won't be here any more.'

Rose sighed. 'Don't be silly, Mum. I'll pop back for a visit soon. Make sure the family silver gets a good polish ready.'

'Family silver!' Rose could hear Jackie's voice go up a notch. 'It might please you to joke, my girl, but I'll have you know that I've just won the lottery.'

'Y'what?' Rose said. 'That's incredible! I don't believe it! How much?'

There was a sound, somewhere outside Jackie's end of the phone call. A shout, or a cry, or something. 'Listen love, I've gotta go now. Lovely to hear from ya. Gotta go.'

There was a click, and the phone was silent. Rose looked down at it in surprise. Then, shaking her head, she slipped the phone back in her pocket.

'Talk for England, you said,' the Doctor commented, strolling over to the central controls. 'Can't get her off the phone.'

'My mum's won the lottery!' Rose started pacing around the control room, her eyes shining. 'How brilliant is that? We'll be able to get a great big house –'

The Doctor raised an eyebrow, gesturing at the enormous room in which they stood.

'– go on holiday – the Caribbean or somewhere – or Florida!'

The Doctor stared at her. 'I can take you anywhere in time and space!'

She wasn't listening. 'I've always wanted to go to Disneyland.'

'Yeah, brilliant, grown men dressed up as mice and kids being sick on roller coasters. I can take you to planets where there are real talking mice. And ducks!'

She shrugged. 'But you haven't, though, have ya? And y'wouldn't take my mum, anyway.'

He grinned. 'Well, maybe not. Don't wanna scare the mice.' He carried on before Rose could respond. 'She all happy then, is she? Too busy spending to talk to you?'

Rose grimaced. 'Yeah, that was weird.' She paused for a second, and then gave him what she hoped was a winning smile. 'Don't s'pose we could pop home for a bit, could we? Just to check on her.'

'D'you think something's up?' he asked.

'No, not really. But she did say somethin' about not bein' there when I get back,' Rose said. 'Don't want to turn up one day and find she's gone off to some country mansion and chucked out all my stuff.'

'A couple of old posters and a teddy bear? Yeah, that'd be a tragedy.'

Rose gave him a mock glare. 'I'm nineteen years old, I think I have grown out of teddy bears, and I do have a few more possessions than that. Some of which have sentimental value, I'll have you know. So could we go home please? Just for a flyin' visit, I promise.'

'Yeah, all right.' He nodded, and started setting a course. 'I don't know, humans, always come with so much baggage . . .'

'Yeah, it's a crime, ain't it?' she agreed. And then, after a moment. 'You don't really think she'd chuck out Mr Tedopoulos, do you?'

The Doctor just grinned.

* * *

It turned out that Mr Tedopoulos was safe! Which was more than could be said for a lot of people on the estate. Jackie hadn't really won the lottery; she'd won a games console on a free, promotional scratch card, which she'd given to Mickey. What she really wanted to win was one of the holidays.

"Mrs Hall down the road won one; it's wasted on someone like that, you know what she's like, probably won't take her hat and coat off even if it's eighty degrees, and there's me with a bikini still with its label on, stuck in the drawer that I've never had a chance to wear . . ." she'd told Rose when she'd arrived.

Sitting in a dark, alien pyramid, with the remains of people from the estate scattered around her, she knew her mother didn't want to win this holiday. No, seriously, she REALLY didn't want to! She'd seen Mrs Hall, still with her tea cosy hat on her head, even if her head wasn't attached to her body. There were bits of Johnny Deans scattered about who she'd known at school.

They were dead because the games consoles weren't really games consoles. They were remote control units that moved the people like avatars in an alien shoot 'em up game. The people who had won the holidays, had control disks fitted to their foreheads which took away their free will and turned them into puppets.

And when they had travelled to the planet Toop to try and rescue the people from the ruthless, porcupine-like Quevvils, Rose had been forced to become an avatar, and the Doctor had been forced to use her to infiltrate the Mantodean stronghold, and overcome their defences so that the Quevvils could invade.

Rose had played some innocent video games when she was younger, running a blue hedgehog around the screen to collect gold rings, and a couple of plumbers so they could collect stars. But then the consoles got more advanced, and the games more realistic, and now, having been one of those characters . . . well, it just wasn't fun anymore.

In fact, it had been terrifying. She screwed her eyes shut as she imagined what the people who didn't survive had gone through. Just standing there, unable to move as a two metre tall mantis-like alien approached and bit your head off.

Rose's only comfort was that she knew her body was being controlled by her best friend, a person she trusted implicitly and knew wouldn't let her down . . . okay, hoped wouldn't let her down. There had been a few close calls, where she was just standing still, not knowing that the Doctor had needed to overcome the Quevvil guard.

And now it was over, and she was sitting on a wide ledge. Behind her was a steep slope that she couldn't get purchase on to climb. To her side was a fellow avatar survivor from the Powell estate, Daisy Watson. In front of them was a bottomless pit.

She was trying to think of ways of getting over the pit, when she heard a sound that wasn't just music to her ears, it was the most wonderful music ever, it was the greatest symphony ever written, performed by the best orchestra in the world. It was the sound of the TARDIS.

Rose had to grab Daisy, who had started to back away in astonishment and fear, forgetting – or no longer caring – that there was a very deep pit behind. And then, suddenly, there was the TARDIS in front of them, its flashing light banishing the darkness, banishing their fear.

The door opened. A young lad poked his head out – and saw Daisy.

'Bobbles!' she screamed. 'Oh, my darling, my darling!'

The lad put up with her massive embrace with fairly bad grace. 'Mum,' he said, 'my name is Robert.'

Then the Doctor appeared, still the same as ever, grinning away. 'Rescue party!' he said.

He turned to Daisy, and seemed to be checking her out. Rose coughed, pointedly.

'Is this your mum then?' he said to Robert. 'Funny, that. She's not really how I imagined her from your description . . .'

Robert shrugged and made a face.

'Hello,' said the Doctor to Daisy, holding out a hand. 'I'm the Doctor.'

She grabbed at his hand with both of hers, thanks pouring out of her mouth. It took a while for the Doctor to extricate himself. Then he turned to Rose. 'There you are then. All right?'

'Yeah,' she lied. 'I'm all right.' She was far from all right, but she would be.

They went into the TARDIS, and in the Medi-bay, the Doctor removed the control discs from Rose and Daisy's foreheads, along with the neural filaments that had infiltrated their motor cortex's. Rose then went to the kitchen to make a pot of tea.

They landed back on the Powell Estate, opposite the Chinese and the youth club, and Rose wasn't a bit surprised. The place was deserted, though – the latest of late nighters had gone to bed and the early birds weren't up yet. It was that depressing time in the early morning where the only people about were milkmen, police officers – and time travellers.

She explained to Daisy and Robert where they were. 'There won't be buses for an hour or two, I don't reckon,' she said. But Daisy said that was fine; they'd find a night bus, or they'd walk, or get a taxi, or something.

She looked at the Doctor and sighed. 'Suppose we'd better hang around till the mornin' then. Go and see everyone. Thank Mickey for savin' the day, and all that. Make sure he's given Mrs Burton her shoppin' basket back. Stuff like that.'

The Doctor looked horror-stricken. 'Tell Mickey the idiot that he saved the day? What d'you wanna do that for?'

'You said he did! You told me all about it!'

He shook his head. 'No I didn't. Didn't say anything of the kind. I said he'd been of some slight use, and at least he didn't muck everything up like normal.'

'You could tell him that then,' she said. 'It's high praise, comin' from you.' But he looked quite alarmed.

'And then there's my mum,' she said. 'I need to call the hospital, find out how she is.' Jackie had been mugged by Darren Pye, a local thug and had her winning holiday ticket stolen.

Rose glanced at Bucknall House, up high at her flat. There was a light on in the window. 'Mum said that Darren Pye nicked her keys!' she said. 'We've got burglars!' And she raced off.

Rose let herself into the flat as quietly as she could. The Doctor was following on behind. Burglars didn't stand a chance against them.

Light was coming from under the door to her right. Her mum's room. She pushed the door open, ready to shout or fight or scream. But inside there was just her mum, asleep. The bruises on her face shone brightly coloured in the illumination from the lamp, and Rose's heart twisted.

She put up a hand to stop the Doctor coming any further, and padded softly over to the bed. But she must have made some noise, because Jackie's eyes flickered open. There was alarm in them for a moment, then relief and happiness as she recognised Rose. 'Hello, darlin',' she whispered.

'Hello, Mum,' said Rose. 'They let you out then?' She hadn't thought they would, not yet. Her mum had looked so awful. But the sense of relief, knowing it hadn't been as bad as all that – it was overwhelming.

Jackie smiled sleepily. 'Mm. Said I'll be fine. Just take it easy.' She yawned.

'Go back to sleep,' Rose said.

'Will you still be here in the mornin'?'

Rose leaned over and kissed her mum gently on the forehead. 'Dunno,' she said. 'But I'll see you soon, whatever.'

Then, as Jackie's eyes closed again, Rose crept out of the room.

The Doctor was making a cup of tea in the kitchen.

'Mum's asleep,' Rose said, yawning herself. 'Not a bad idea, I reckon. I've got my room and you can have the sofa.'

The Doctor helped himself to a biscuit. 'Yeah, then maybe tomorrow we could go and feed the ducks in the park, or p'raps there'll be a good film on telly.'

She gave him a hard stare. 'So, you're tellin' me you don't want to hang around.'

''S boring,' he said. 'Who wants to do ordinary things like sleep, when there's a universe to explore? What would you rather do, catch forty winks, or nip off to have a look at the moons of Jupiter?'

'I don't know,' she said, teasing. 'Isn't it quite cold up there?'

'Somewhere warm, then!' he said. 'We could watch the building of the Great Pyramid, or investigate this rumour I heard about this mad scientist who tried to build asbestos robots to colonise the sun.'

And all of Rose's tiredness fell away as he spoke. She looked out of the window as the sun rose upon another grey London day, and thought about the alternatives the Doctor was offering. And she realised that while she might truly be the mistress of her own destiny, sometimes there really wasn't much of a choice.

'Yeah, all right,' she said as the cup of tea perked her up.

They finished their drinks; Rose washed the cups, and then left her mum a note. Arm in arm, they left the flat, and Rose spotted some missing persons posters on the walls and columns as they walked along the landing to the stairs.

She thought about the time she was a year late coming home, and how her mum had worried that she might be dead and would never see her again.

'How many d'ya think died?' Rose asked as she looked over the estate from the landing.

'Too many,' he replied solemnly. He'd recently counted a group of casualties; he didn't want to make a habit of it. 'Families will file missing person reports. Police will investigate. The people we rescued can give statements, and maybe a final count will be made.'

"But there would be no bodies," Rose thought, "no closure for the families."

Yes, it was definitely time to move on.


	10. Chapter 10

**Chapter 10**

Rose was running after a blue hedgehog, seemingly dragged along by some invisible rope. It would hold out its arm and collect an impossible number of gold rings. She wanted to stop running. She wanted control of her body back, but she couldn't stop.

She was having a bad dream. Soon after the TARDIS took off, the effect of the tea started to wear off, and she couldn't stop yawning. The Doctor had told her to go to bed and have a power nap.

She felt a presence enter her dream, enter her mind, and she stopped running. She felt the presence stroke away her bad dream and give her back control. She knew the TARDIS had done that for her in the past. However, it wasn't the TARDIS this time, and what she didn't feel were the fingers gently stroking away the strands of hair over her face, and the lips that gently kissed her forehead.

She awoke with a start, not knowing how long she'd been sleeping. It must have been longer than she intended, because she felt refreshed and ready to face the universe again. She went through to the en suite and had a quick shower.

She found a hair dryer in one of the drawers, and quickly dried her hair before fixing her hair back off her face. She selected a tight fitting union jack T-shirt, which she felt made her look "hot".

While she was admiring herself in the mirror, she felt the TARDIS lurch slightly underfoot.

'Do they have turbulence in the Vortex?' she asked herself.

She quickly made her way to the console room, where she could hear the Doctor flying the TARDIS. When she entered the room, the Doctor was holding on to the console, looking intently at the view screen.

'Whatcha doin'?' she asked, feeling the TARDIS roll and shake.

'The TARDIS scanners have detected an object whistling past.'

'What's the emergency?' she asked him as she ran to the console and held on herself.

'It's mauve,' he said, as if that was enough for Rose to know what was going on.

'Mauve?' she asked. What the hell is mauve when it's at home?

'The universally recognised colour for danger.'

She ran around to stand by the side of him and look at the view screen. 'What happened to red?'

'That's just humans. By everyone else's standards, red's camp,' he said with a smile. 'Oh, the misunderstandings, all those red alerts, all that dancing.'

He made a few adjustments and tapped some controls. 'It's got a very basic flight computer. I've hacked in, slaved the TARDIS. Where it goes, we go.'

'And that's safe, is it?'

'Totally,' he told her with confidence.

As if on cue, there was a bang and flash from the console to refute that statement and undermine his confidence.

'Okay, reasonably. Should have said reasonably there,' he conceded. He checked the view screen again; the object was initiating evasive manoeuvres. 'No, no, no, no! It's jumping time tracks, getting away from us.'

'What exactly is this thing?' Rose was wondering if they should be chasing something that could jump time tracks (whatever they were) and give the TARDIS a run for its money.

'No idea.'

"Oh brilliant!" she thought. 'Then why are we chasing it?'

'It's mauve and dangerous, and about thirty seconds from the centre of London.'

Ah, right, fair enough.

* * *

The Doctor and Rose entered the TARDIS and walked up the ramp towards the console. The Doctor was elated by the events of the last few hours; it had gone some way to making amends for his part in ending the Time War.

'The nanogenes will clean up the mess and switch themselves off, because I just told them to. Nancy and Jamie will go to Doctor Constantine for help, ditto,' he said as he did a circuit of the console. 'All in all, all things considered, fantastic!'

Rose was standing there with an enormous smile on her face. She had not seen him like this before, and it was a side of his character that she definitely wanted to see more of. 'Look at you, beaming away like you're Father Christmas.'

'Who says I'm not, red bicycle when you were twelve?' he said mysteriously.

'What?' What did he know about that red bicycle? She remembered the Christmas when her best friend Shareen was having a bike, and she'd shown her mum the same bike as they were passing the shop. It would be brilliant if they both had bikes, just imagine the mischief they could get up to.

Her mum said that she couldn't afford it, what with all the bills to pay and everything, but when the bike mysteriously appeared outside the door of the flat on Christmas morning, she thought her mum had told her that so that it would be a surprise. Now she thought about it though, her mum seemed to be as surprised as she was.

'And everybody lives, Rose! Everybody lives!' he said spreading his arms wide. 'I need more days like this.'

'Doctor,' Rose said hesitantly, there was something bothering her.

'Go on, ask me anything. I'm on fire.' He punched the air and started prepping the TARDIS for flight.

'What about Jack?'

He looked up from the console without answering.

'Why'd he say goodbye?'

He looked back at the console. 'That'd be because the stasis field holding the bomb is decaying, when it fails, it explodes,' he said so quietly that she could hardly hear him.

'But he'll be able to dump the bomb won't he?' The look that he gave her made her doubt her assumption.

'Doctor? He will be able to get rid of the bomb,' she pressed.

He slammed home a lever and the Time Rotor started to pump up and down, before moving around to another section and pressing a button with a sideways arrow on it. The Glenn Miller Orchestra started playing Moonlight Serenade through the TARDIS speakers. The Doctor moved away from the console and held his hands out towards her.

'Are you ready to see my moves?' he asked her.

'But what about Jack?' she asked incredulously.

'Oh, he can see my moves later,' he said with a grin.

'No, I mean isn't he going to be blown up?'

The Doctor flicked a switch on the console and the Time Rotor stopped. He flicked another switch and the TARDIS doors opened.

'He will if he doesn't get in here in the next thirty seconds.' He took Rose's hand, grabbed her around the waist, and started trying to waltz.

Rose looked through the doors and saw Jack sitting in the pilot's seat of the Chula ship with a drink in his hand. 'Well, hurry up then!' she shouted.

Jack leaped out of the chair and ran into the TARDIS where Rose was trying to show the Doctor the basics of the waltz.

'Okay. And right and turn.' She ended up with her arm held uncomfortably behind her. 'Okay, okay, try and spin me again, but this time don't get my arm up my back. No extra points for a half-nelson.'

The Doctor looked disappointed. 'I'm sure I used to know this stuff.' He turned and looked at Jack. 'Close the door, will you? Your ship's about to blow up. There's going to be a draught.'

Jack turned and shut the door, while the Doctor started up the engine.

'Welcome to the TARDIS,' the Doctor said with a smile.

'Much bigger on the inside,' Jack observed.

'You'd better be,' the Doctor cheekily replied.

Rose took Jack's hand and led him up the ramp. 'I think what the Doctor's trying to say is you may cut in.'

Whilst he was at the console, the Doctor selected another Glenn Miller track, In the Mood. 'Rose! I've just remembered!' he announced as his feet started to move to the beat.

'What?'

'I can dance! I can dance!' He moved towards her, clicking his fingers and moving to the beat.

'Actually, Doctor, I thought Jack might like this dance.'

He stood dancing in front of her. 'I'm sure he would, Rose, I'm absolutely certain, but who with?'

Rose smiled, shook her head, stepped forwards into his arms, and started to jive. Jack started to grin at them as they tripped the light fantastic around the console. These two were so sweet, because it was obvious to him that they were in love; in fact he thought it would probably be obvious to anyone . . . except them.

The Doctor finished the dance by dipping Rose backwards, which made her squeal with laughter, before pulling her back up into a hug.

Jack smirked and shook his head before speaking. 'So what happens now,' he asked, expecting to be delivered to the Shadow Proclamation for processing and incarceration for fraud.

'Champagne!' the Doctor said, releasing Rose from the hug.

'Champagne?'

'A beer then? Or a Martini, you look like you might be a Martini man,' the Doctor said, as he and Rose started to head for the kitchen.

Jack set off after them. 'No, champagne's fine, I was talking about punishment for my crimes.'

'We know this nice little penal colony you might like to stay at,' Rose said with a cheeky grin.

The Doctor reached a bottle of Dom Perignon from the wine rack, and opened a cupboard to take out three champagne flutes. 'Well Jack, I could drop you off with the authorities, and let them dispense justice, but today is your lucky day, because today everybody lived, everybody got a second chance.'

'POP!' He pulled the cork out of the bottle and started to fill the glasses. He handed one to Rose and one to Jack before filling his own.

'Never been much for authority, me,' he started.

Rose snorted a laugh. 'You're tellin' me.'

He glanced at her with a mock expression of hurt. 'And everybody deserves a second chance. Anyway, let's look at the facts. You did actually look inside the Chula ambulance to see if it was dangerous, and you did save my jeopardy friendly Rose here from falling to her death.'

'Jeopardy friendly?' she said as she slapped his arm.

'And you did save us all from an exploding bomb, at great personal risk to yourself. So, all things considered, I think you've made amends for any past misdemeanours.'

He raised his glass in the air. 'I propose a toast…, to life; and to everybody living.'

'To life,' they echoed.

* * *

'Oh God, it's beautiful,' Rose said, the reflected rainbow of light glistening in her eyes. The glass pyramid was acting like a prism and splitting the light of the sun into its component colours.

Both the Doctor and Jack looked down at her with grins on their faces, feeling her childlike wonder at the spectacle in front of them. The pyramid was over 500 feet high, and was made of blocks of fused silica glass, just as the Great Pyramid of Giza on Earth had been constructed of blocks of stone.

'Oh God is right,' the Doctor said. 'The Sanclunian's built it as a tribute to their Sun God, the prism effect showing the multifaceted, omnipresence in all its glory.'

'Wow!' is all she could manage to breath, the effect was hypnotic.

'And not a prison warder in sight,' Jack said with a wicked grin.

They had told him an after dinner story of how the TARDIS had been dragged to the planet Justice Prime, and they'd been thrown in prison. This had made Rose a bit reluctant to visit another alien planet, only agreeing to visit Woman Wept, when the Doctor assured her that the only life was frozen plankton, waiting in stasis for when the planets star would start emitting more heat again.

Jack realised that she needed to build up her confidence by visiting some tourist destinations, which were officially safe. He suggested San Kaloon, and Rose looked dubious, so he used the TARDIS's universal Wi-Fi to show her 'The Backpacker's Guide to the Galaxy', and the five star recommendations for a visit.

That got a raucous laugh from Rose. 'You're tellin' me there's an actual 'Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy'?'

'Of course,' the Doctor said with a deadpan expression. 'Oh, hang on, you didn't know Douglas Adams wasn't from Earth, did you?' he said as he flew the TARDIS towards San Kaloon.

When the Doctor landed the TARDIS at the recommended destination, Rose was still non committal. The Doctor walked around the console and held her hand, his ancient, blue eyes looking into her warm, hazel orbs.

'You trust me don't you?'

'Of course,' she said without hesitation, but then added a proviso. 'But I also trust you to find trouble, even when you're not deliberately lookin' for it.'

'Hah! She's got you there Doc,' Jack said with a laugh. 'Here, let's see if I can put your mind at rest.'

Being from the fiftieth century, Jack was savvy with futuristic equipment, and, to the Doctor's surprise and admiration, he quickly worked out how to use the TARDIS scanner. That was a bit more 'Spock' for Rose, and she accepted the reassurance that the planet was indeed tourist friendly.

The Doctor's usual method of scanning a landing site was to open the doors and go and have a look. Rose and Jack though were human, and had a healthy dose of paranoia mixed in with that curiosity that the Doctor found so charming. This gave them a very healthy survival instinct, and Rose wondered how the Doctor had survived for as long as he had.

Jack was right; there were no prison warders, no prisoners, just a multitude of alien species enjoying the view of this spectacular edifice, and the San Kaloon monks in their silvery white robes, going about their daily devotions.

'Does anyone need passports or travel visas out here among the stars?' Rose asked, finally feeling like a space tourist. There was something about having Jack there with them that made it feel more like an '18 - 30' holiday, than a bank holiday day out at the seaside.

'Nah, when a planet becomes a member of the stellar community, local planetary boundaries tend to become obsolete,' the Doctor told her.

'Oh.' That had got her thinking.

Jack took a photograph of the Doctor and Rose, his arm around her shoulders, hers around his waist, with the pyramid behind them, glowing in all its transparent glory. They visited the museum, which explained how they thought the ancient pyramid had been built and the glass blocks polished. Rose bought a little glass pyramid paper weight from the gift shop for her mum as a souvenir of her visit.

While the Doctor was busy looking at a diorama model of the pyramid and the surrounding terrain, reading the explanatory text about the various building phases of the edifice, Rose nipped back into the gift shop and bought him a gift. It was a mug with a transparent, triangular section seamlessly formed into the ceramic of the mug.

They had a very enjoyable meal in the rooftop restaurant of the hotel they were staying in, that overlooked the pyramid and the plain that it sat on. Jack regaled them with a tale of when he and a group of friends had taken off their clothes and run naked through a women's institute meeting that had been convened to protest at the decline in moral standards of the young people of today.

Rose had never met anyone like Jack before. He was totally relaxed, comfortable, and confident with his sexuality, in fact, most of his stories ended up with him being naked. That had got her wondering what he looked like under that RAF uniform, and she didn't have to wonder for long, as the next morning he had appeared out of one of the guest bedrooms wearing a tight fitting white T-shirt that showed off his muscular chest and arms.

After lunch, they went shopping in the alien bazaar, where Jack wanted to pick up some extra clothes. Everything he owned had been on the Chula ship when it exploded, so he needed to restock his wardrobe. Rose was also keen to add to her wardrobe, so they set off together.

Rose put her jeans, top and trainers into one of the bags, and wore the above knee, strappy, flower print dress that she had just bought, along with a short white jacket and sandals. Jack wore the white trousers and blue T-shirt he'd just bought as well.

The Doctor noticed them laughing and joking hand in hand, as they came out of the shop, and felt something strange, stirring in his chest. Jack was a handsome man, unlike him; he was human, unlike him; he was nearer to Rose's age, unlike him; and he wasn't scarred by a war that had killed billions, unlike him.

Rose looked for him as she came out of the shop and smiled at him, before her face fell. She had seen that look on his face before, in the van Statten bunker, facing the Dalek. She immediately released Jack's hand and walked over to him.

'Are you okay?' she asked him, and saw his automatic smile switch on, the one that didn't quite reach his ancient eyes.

'Yeah, I'm fine.'

Rose instinctively reached for his hand and their fingers intertwined, the smile finally reaching his eyes at that touch. She knew that simple gesture kept him grounded; let him know that whatever happened, she was there for him, just as he was there for her.

He looked down at her and raised his eyebrows. 'You look nice, that outfit suits you. I take it you're not planning on running anywhere, or getting into trouble then.'

Jack came over and stood by the Doctor, and Rose smiled at them both. 'Nah, I reckon you were both right, this place is fantastic.'

'Got your confidence back then?' Jack asked.

'Yeah, I suppose not everywhere is dangerous, and not everyone is tryin' to kill us or throw us in prison,' she said with a laugh. She linked arms with her two men and looked from one to the other. 'C'mon then, let's see what other touristy things there are to do around here.'


	11. Chapter 11

**Chapter 11**

The central column of the main console was doing what it was supposed to do; all the right lights were flashing; Captain Jack Harkness was whistling and all was well. Jack paused mid-whistle to press a button that really didn't need pressing, then resumed his rather florid rendition of 'Pack up Your Troubles . . .'

The Doctor and Rose were in the dining area of the kitchen, enjoying a cup of tea in his new San Kaloon Pyramid mug. Jack had brought his cup of coffee into the console room, feeling that he was a bit of a gooseberry when those two were flirting with each other.

He hadn't worked them out yet. They kept claiming that they were just friends, travelling together. But if they looked at him the way they looked at each other, he'd have them in bed so fast their heads would spin. One at a time or both together, he didn't mind. After all, he was a fiftieth century kind of guy.

The warning bleep that occurred when he pressed the button that really didn't need pressing, was so perfectly in time with the beat that he didn't even notice it until he was halfway through the next chorus.

'Smile,' bleep, 'smile,' bleep, 'smile,' bleep . . .

Then he was all action. At the console, checking the scanner and scrolling down the mass of information. Not a lot of it made sense, but he nodded knowingly just in case the Doctor or Rose came in.

'A warning?' He checked another readout. 'Cry for help . . .'

Grinned. 'Damsel in distress, maybe.' Probably best not to touch anything. Probably best to wait for the Doctor. Then again: 'What the hell . . .'

The Doctor arrived at a run, Rose in his wake. He was stern, she was grinning.

'What's the fuss?' Rose asked.

'Just a distress call,' Jack told her, moving aside as the Doctor's elbow connected with his stomach. 'Nothing much. Happens all the time on the high frontier.'

'Not like this,' the Doctor told him, not looking up from the scanner. 'This is serious stuff.'

As if in reply, the bleeping changed from a regular pulse to a violent cacophony. 'That shouldn't happen.' Slowly, the Doctor turned towards Jack. 'You haven't done anything stupid, have you?'

'What, me? You think I don't know the standard operating procedure?'

'There isn't a standard operating procedure,' Rose reminded him. She was at the console too now, straining to see the scanner. 'Here, let's have a butcher's.'

'Oh, great. Distress call comes in and you want to open a meat shop.'

'Shut it, you two,' the Doctor ordered. 'Someone's responded to the signal, so that's all right.'

'Is it?' Rose asked.

'Yeah. Whoever it was will go and help. Sorted.'

'They will?' Jack asked quietly.

'Bound to. Morally obliged. They get first dibs. No one else'll bother now there's been a response, will they? Automated systems broadcast for help, someone responds and they start streaming all sorts of location data and details. Signal strength's gone up 500 per cent, probably using the last of their back-up emergency power. Though after so long it'll be a waste of someone's time, I expect.'

'I wonder who responded,' Rose said. She was already turning away, dismissing the problem from her mind.

'Er, well,' Jack said. 'Actually . . .'

The Doctor's mouth dropped open. 'You didn't . . .' He turned away as Jack started whistling again. 'You did.' He was back at the scanner. 'They're getting pretty frantic now, thinking they're about to be rescued from whatever godforsaken lump of rock they're stuck on. Well, they needn't think I'm going to . . .' His voice tailed off into a frown.

'Morally obliged,' Jack said quietly.

'Yeah, we should go and help, Doctor,' Rose put in. 'Where are they?'

'Some barren wilderness that's good for nothing,' Jack suggested.

The Doctor looked up, smiling again now. 'It's Earth – early twenty- first century.'

Jack nodded glumly. 'Told you so.'

'Oi!' Rose said, nudging him in the ribs with her elbow. 'That's my home turf you're dissin'.'

'It's fading. Power's running down, I s'pose,' the Doctor said. He tapped at the flickering lights on the scanner that represented the pulse beat of the signal.

'They must be in a bad way,' Jack said.

'Do we know who they are?' Rose wondered. The lights and readings meant nothing to her. 'What they are?'

'Probably long dead,' the Doctor decided. 'But since our associate here told them we'd come and help, we'd better check to be sure.'

Jack raised an eyebrow. 'Well, if you don't want to.'

'It's not whether I want to, is it? I'm morally obliged.' The Doctor nudged him aside as he moved round the console. 'You morally obliged me.'

'Me too,' Rose reminded them.

'It's a repeating pattern,' Jack told them. 'A loop.'

'Yeah, well, it would be. Like "Mayday, mayday, mayday."'

'Or "SOS, SOS, SOS",' Rose added.

Jack sniffed. 'I just meant maybe we can decipher it. Work out what it means.'

'It means "Help."' The bell at the side of the console dinged and the Doctor thumped at a control. 'Coming?'

Jack was still examining the line of pulse beats on the scanner. 'If it is a loop, maybe we should look at it as a loop.'

He flicked at a control and the repeated line bent round on itself to form a circle. The pulses were shown as illuminated patches, slightly different shapes and sizes spaced slightly irregularly.

Rose peered over Jack's shoulder. 'Looks like a map of Stonehenge,' she said. 'Come on, we're gettin' left behind. As usual.'

'What were you saying about Stonehenge?' the Doctor called as they stepped out of the TARDIS.

'Oh, nothing,' Rose said.

She was glad of her coat, pulling it tight around her against the bitter chill. The bright sunlight seemed to make no impact on the inches of snow lying underfoot.

'That's good. Because . . .' The Doctor was striding out across the snow-covered plain, staring at the landscape ahead of them and leaving a trail of footsteps in his wake.

The TARDIS was on the top of a cliff, wind blowing round it, sending Rose's hair into a frenzy and kicking up puffs of snow at her feet. She could hear the crash of the waves from far below. But her attention was on the Doctor.

He turned and looked back, grinning 'Interesting, don't you think?'

To one side of him was a wood, the trees spiky and bare, dripping with icicles. To the other side of the Doctor, on the horizon, stood a line of stones. Standing stones. They seemed to glitter in the cold sunlight, as if studded with quartz that was catching the light.

'A stone circle,' Rose said. 'That's a coincidence.'

'Coincidence, my –' But Jack's words were drowned out by the sudden roar of sound.

The wind was blowing up even more. Snow blasting across the cliff and stinging Rose's eyes. A huge helicopter, like a giant metal spider, was hanging menacingly in the air, level with the top of the cliff.

A door slid open halfway along its side, and a man leaped out – a soldier. Khaki uniform, heavy pack, combat helmet, assault rifle. And behind him a line of identical figures leaping to the ground, keeping low, spreading out in a circle and running to their positions.

The Doctor wandered slowly back to join Rose and Jack. 'Welcoming party?' he wondered.

The circle complete, the soldiers levelled their rifles – aiming directly at the Doctor and his friends. The first man out of the helicopter was walking slowly towards the middle of the circle.

His own rifle was slung over his shoulder and he moved with confidence and determination. He stopped directly in front of the Doctor. And, just from his eyes, Rose could tell he was furious.

* * *

To be fair, Jack's suggestion of it being a "barren wilderness that's good for nothing" wasn't far off. It was an abandoned Soviet naval base on the Novrosk Peninsula, where nuclear submarines had been left to rust and rot.

It was cold, isolated, forgotten.

Cold? It wasn't cold, it was freezing! Rose shivered inside her parka jacket, and whished she'd taken the time to dress in the fur outfit that she'd worn on Woman Wept. That had kept her lovely and warm.

She had a wistful smile on her lips as she remembered the snowball fight with the Doctor, how they'd wrestled in the snow, and the look in his eyes when he'd gazed into hers. It seemed so long ago now . . .

'I was worried about you,' Jack said, bringing her out of her memories and into the stone circle on the cliff top. 'I had to come back,' Jack went on. 'To make sure you were all right.'

'I was fine, thanks,' Rose said from behind him, and then realised he wasn't talking to her. He was talking to Valeria Mamentova, a local girl the same age as Rose, but who looked to be over a hundred.

'You can take care of yourself,' he replied, without turning. He was still facing Valeria, still holding her limp, lifeless hand. 'She doesn't even know I'm here, does she?' he said quietly.

Valeria had been a victim of the mythical Vourdulak, a sort of vampire or siren – a seemingly beautiful young woman who entraps the unwary and then drains their energy to keep herself young and beautiful, whereas in fact she is old and ugly.

Except it wasn't a myth, and it wasn't the Vourdulak. It was a group of scientists at the Novrok research institute who had been tinkering with the energy collectors of a crashed alien ship, the one that was sending the distress signal. They were keeping themselves young by taking the life force of poor, unsuspecting villagers.

Valeria's boyfriend, Pavel Vahlen had been completely drained and turned to a jelly-like husk. Valeria had been saved when Jack responded to the distress beacon and diverted the resources of the alien ship.

'I shall look after her,' her father Mamentov said. 'I see now that it is my duty.' He had been so distressed at his daughter's condition that he had abandoned her in the village when they ran from the alien threat.

Fedor Vahlen clapped his hand on the man's shoulder. 'I will help you, my friend,' he said. 'It is what Pavel would have wanted. We will all help.'

'Thank you,' Mamentov said. He reached out and took his daughter's hand from Jack. 'And thank you, Captain. You have taught an old man something he should already have known.' Jack had risked his life to carry the girl out of the village to safety.

Jack nodded sadly. 'I'm sorry I can't do more.' He looked into Valeria's expressionless, wrinkled face. He stroked her fine blonde hair with the back of his hand. Then he turned away.

Colonel Oleg Levin, Lieutenant Krylek and the Special Forces soldiers were waiting nearby for the helicopters. Now the alien ship had powered down, the radio interference was gone and they had called for back-up – there was rebuilding to do and Levin had bullied his superiors into funding it.

He had pointed out that Catherine Kornilova, a mature student, who'd been studying for a higher degree in nuclear physics, was willing and able to detail the illegal and dangerous work that the institute had been carrying out.

Even though no one in the Kremlin had any idea what it might be, the implications were enough given that the institute had been set up to research biological weapons and that Levin had given them a rough estimate of the military and civilian death toll.

'Time we were on our way,' the Doctor said. 'If you're done with the goodbyes.'

Rose nudged Jack with her shoulder. 'Hey,' she said. 'We did good.'

'Did we?' Jack wasn't so sure. Okay, they'd shut down the alien ship and defeated the scientists who were draining people of their life force, but at what cost? So many dead; and a young woman who was now older than her father.

'Oh yeah,' the Doctor said. 'Would have happened sooner or later. And we defeated the villains. Saved the world.'

Jack nodded. 'But sometimes, you know, that just doesn't seem to be enough.'

'It's a good start,' Rose said sympathetically.

It was beginning to snow. Large, lazy flakes were twisting down from the sky and settling on the smooth stones of the circle. Jack paused, sighed and turned back towards the little group of villagers who had gathered to see them off. They couldn't know where they were going or how they intended to travel, but they seemed to know that it was goodbye.

The Doctor and Rose stopped too. The Doctor waved. 'Cheerio, then,' he called.

'Come on,' Rose said. 'It's freezing.'

'I'll catch you up.' Jack was running back through the thickening snow. He stopped in front of Valeria and looked again into her glassy, unfocused eyes. 'I forgot to say goodbye.' He leaned forwards and kissed her gently on the cheek.

And slowly, with no change of expression, she reached her arms around Jack and held him tight. Just for a few moments. In the cold, cold snow.


	12. Chapter 12

**Chapter 12**

'You are gonna love this, Rose,' enthused the Doctor as he leaped from panel to panel of the TARDIS console, his eyes alight with childish optimism in the reflected green glow of the grinding central column.

As always, Rose felt the Doctor's enthusiasm building the same anticipation and excitement in her. She grabbed the edge of the console as the TARDIS gave one of its customary lurches and smiled over at him. 'Tell me more.'

The Doctor spun a dial and threw a lever. 'Kegron Pluva,' he announced grandly.

'OK,' mused Rose. 'That a person or a place? Or some sort of oven spray?'

'Planet.' The Doctor beamed. 'It's got the maddest ecosystem in the universe.' He flung his arms about, demonstrating. 'You've got six moons going one way, three moons going the other way, and a sun that only orbits the planet! Forty-three seasons in one year. The top life form, it's a kind of dog-plant-fungus thing . . .'

'Top dog-plant-fungus,' laughed Rose.

'Yeah.' The Doctor nodded. 'Plus the water's solid and everyone eats a kind of metal plum . . .'

Rose held up a hand. 'Enough spoilers. Just let me see it.' She was tingling with pleasure, goose bumps coming up on her arms at the prospect of stepping out from the TARDIS onto this bizarre alien world.

'I'm really gonna regret pointing this out,' said a third voice, 'but . . . does that mean what I think it means?'

Rose and the Doctor looked up to see Captain Jack, who had joined them in the control room and was pointing to one of the instruments built into the base of the console, a small black box which was emitting a steady flashing red light. He knelt down and fiddled with some buttons on the box.

The Doctor joined him and slapped his hand playfully. 'You're still here, then,' he said, shaking his head mock-ruefully. 'I've gotta remember, put the parental control on.'

Rose looked the captain over. He had obviously been plundering the Doctor's incredibly extensive wardrobe in the depths of the TARDIS. She imagined that he'd been inspired by being on that submarine in Novrosk. He was wearing an old-fashioned Merchant Navy outfit in blue serge with white piping.

'Hello, sailor,' she said with a cheeky grin as she joined him and the Doctor under the console.

Captain Jack smiled. 'I wondered which one of you was gonna say that first.'

Rose winced. 'Could those trousers be any tighter?'

'Is that a request?' he asked with raised eyebrows, before returning his attention to the flashing light. 'So, isn't that a temporal distortion alert?'

The Doctor pressed some buttons on the box and then he stood up. 'Yeah. I've linked the relay to the screen so we can trace the distortion to its point of origin.'

Rose and the captain stood up and looked over the Doctor's shoulder as he hammered away at the keyboard under the TARDIS's computer screen. A maze of graphics, in the incomprehensible alien script the Doctor always worked in, flickered across it, changing shape every time he pressed the return key.

'Should be able to narrow it down in a bit,' said the Doctor.

'Temporal distortion's a bad thing, then?' Rose surmised. 'I don't suppose it's coming from Kegron Pluva?'

The Doctor performed a final flourish on the keyboard and a row of alien symbols appeared on the screen with a satisfied beep. 'No such luck,' he said dismissively, gesturing to the screen. 'Nobody on Kegron Pluva would be as stupid as . . .' He left the sentence unfinished, looking slightly awkwardly across at Rose.

Rose recognised the tone of voice the Doctor reserved for dissing humans. 'Oh, right, it's coming from Earth,' she said. 'Interesting year?'

'Let's have a look,' said the Doctor, and rattled at the keyboard again. Another row of symbols appeared. 'Yeah,' he said, intrigued. 'Pretty interesting.'

The captain read the display and turned to Rose. 'Interesting, cos why the hell is someone using a dirty rip engine to travel to your time?'

The Doctor performed another manoeuvre on the keyboard and got another result. 'To visit Bromley,' he added, mystified. He started adjusting the controls on the console, obviously changing course to the source of the distortion.

Rose shrugged. 'Ah, well. Kegron Pluva, Bromley . . . probably both about as weird.'

* * *

Weird did not even cover how Rose felt at the moment. From about waist height, she was looking at her own body sitting on the jump seat in the console room. It was dressed like Raquel Welch in that film "One Million Years BC", all legs and cleavage; in a rather sexy fur bikini top, loin cloth and furry, ankle high moccasins, which she felt she carried off rather well.

Living and travelling with the Doctor certainly kept her body fit. It was a good job Jack wasn't here at the moment to see it. Although she felt even he would be put off by the fact that her head was missing, and currently being held under the Doctor's arm.

Rose had always imagined that mad scientists were elderly men with wild, white hair; white coats and a crazy look in their eyes (or was that "Back to the Future?"). The bitch who did this to her had been an incredibly tall, incredibly beautiful dark-haired woman.

Chantal Osterberg possessed even, symmetrical features, with vivid ocean blue eyes, framed by long, exquisitely curled lashes. And forget the white coat; this mad scientist had worn a handsomely tailored business suit with large lapels.

Rose's thoughts were in the past tense of course, because Osterberg had killed herself when trying to travel back to the 439th century, by stepping into the rip engine and being torn apart by the time winds.

And so, here she was travelling back to the year 29,185 BC to find scientists who weren't mad, but had worked with Osterberg, and might know how to reattach her head. It was a long shot, but what other choice did she have? She didn't want to spend the rest of her life as a Halloween novelty act.

And how the hell would she explain this to her mum?

While she was admiring her body, she had a random thought and stood it up to do a slow twirl. 'Oh, that's all right then,' she said.

The loin cloth hung down at the front and back, forming a fur mini skirt, with the side openings showing the top of her shapely thighs and hips.

'Eh?' the Doctor said, turning his attention from the console to look down at her.

'My bum,' she said, nodding with her eyes, because she couldn't move her head. 'It doesn't look big in that furry skirt thing.'

The Doctor looked over at her body, which was standing with its back to him. He raised his eyebrows and smiled. He had to admit, she had a nice bum . . . for a human.

He landed the TARDIS and shut down the console before heading for the doors. Because Rose's head was held looking at the doors, she had to walk her body like a blind person, feeling for the handrail and following it down the ramp.

The Doctor poked his head out, and got a gob of saliva spat on his nose. 'Thanks mate,' said the Doctor, rubbing at it. It was Rose's husband, and he was trying to spit fire at the perceived threat coming out of the strange, blue box.

Yes, Rose had a Neanderthal husband called Tillun. He was the king of his tribe, which meant that she was a queen, and the Julien Macdonald outfit her body was now wearing happened to be her wedding outfit.

As for the fire spitting, the Doctor had used Osterberg's futuristic technology to give the prehistoric humans the temporary ability to spit fire, so that they could defend themselves against Osterberg's genetically engineered Hy-Bractors.

Her mad plan was to release these perfect, flawless Hy-Bractors into pre history and let them feed on the Neanderthals until they had replaced them, creating a utopia of hybrid humans with no aggression, no emotions . . . no humanity.

'Good job I put a time limit on that,' the Doctor said as he stepped out.

'Where is my wife?' demanded Tillun. He raised his spear. 'I want her back!'

'Hiya,' said Rose's head tentatively from under the Doctor's arm.

Tillun stared at her, stared at the Doctor, then dropped his spear and ran off backwards into the woods, screaming.

'Must have been something you said,' said the Doctor.

Rose's body emerged from the TARDIS. 'Shame. I could have married worse people.'

'You still might, with your record at picking them,' the Doctor said. Rose stuck her tongue out at him from under his arm. He turned to address Quilley, Jacob and Lene, Osterberg's scientists, and held up Rose's head. 'Chantal's dust, the Hy-Bractors are all dead –'

Jacob got to his feet. 'Do you want it putting back?'

'No, I love it.' Rose gave him a sarcastic look, forgetting he was an Osterberger and it would be wasted. The inhabitants of Osterberger had their emotions controlled by advanced pharmaceuticals; he wouldn't understand sarcasm. But to her surprise he returned her look with an ironic smile.

The Doctor handed Jacob the instruments. 'Please.'

'I don't know how,' said Jacob.

The Doctor's heart sank and he swallowed hard. He didn't dare look into Rose's eyes, so he kept her head facing away from him. He'd failed her again, and he felt that despair that he'd felt in van Statten's bunker, when he thought the Dalek had killed her.

He started to think of all the worlds and time periods where there might be a medical facility that could reattach her head. Maybe the Sisters of Plentitude on New Earth . . .

'I can do it,' said another voice, bringing him out of his desperate thoughts.

Lene was trying to stand up. 'It's easy,' she said weakly. 'All you have to do is reverse-lock the kinetic seal. I used to do it all the time.'

Jacob looked at her anxiously. 'You're too sick. It's a delicate operation.'

Lene took his hand. 'You can help me. That's what a husband is for.'

She gave him a smile that was entirely genuine.

Jacob felt a prickling behind his eyes and, though it was a wrong feeling, wondered how he could ever have lived without it.

The Doctor took Rose's head from under his arm, cupped her cheeks, and held her face so that he could look into her eyes. She gave him a nervous smile as he nodded and handed her over to Lene.

Lene settled Rose's head on her shoulders, adjusted it slightly and switched on a tiny spherical device. Rose looked anxiously over at the Doctor. He took her hand, and interlinked his fingers with hers. Jacob pressed the device to Rose's forehead and there was a tiny click.

The vertebrae in her neck realigned themselves, and nerves, ligaments, tendons, muscles and blood vessels started to knit together from the centre outwards. It was fascinating to watch as finally, her skin started to grow together to form a seamless, scarless join.

That click was the strangest sensation Rose had ever felt, stranger even than being separated from her body in the first place. In that second she felt totally connected to every part of herself, as if she had reached out for her heart and lungs and was holding them to her.

Lene stepped back and Rose shook her head experimentally, half expecting it to topple down in to the grass. But it stayed firm.

'Thanks,' said Rose. It sounded ludicrously inadequate.

Lene smiled back. Then she stumbled. Jacob caught her and supported her gently, trying to make her comfortable on the hard ground.

Then he turned to the Doctor. 'You beat Chantal, Doctor. So you're cleverer than Chantal?'

The Doctor grinned nonchalantly. 'S'pose I must be.'

Jacob pointed to Lene, her prone form picked out in the light shining from the TARDIS windows. 'Then cure my wife. I want her to live.'

The Doctor's face fell. 'I can't.'

'Doctor,' said Rose quietly. 'Can't or won't?'

The Doctor crossed over to Lene, set the sonic screwdriver to diagnostic mode and ran it over her body.

'There's nothing I can do,' he said. 'Her life's been massively prolonged by genetic restructuring. She had her ageing mechanism switched off. She's had about 400 transplants. But every system, no matter how hard you try, wears out in the end.'

'She's not just a system!' snarled Jacob. His first tears trickled down his face.

The Doctor couldn't answer.

Quilley came close to Jacob and held him. It was not one of Quilley's grandiose, theatrical gestures. He'd moved naturally, comforted Jacob because that was the human thing to do.

The Doctor nodded to Quilley and said quietly, 'I can't take you with me. I can't take you home.'

'It was never my home,' Quilley replied evenly. 'This is my home.' With a small gesture he indicated the deep forest. 'I'm going to live here, and die here.' Some of his grandness seemed to return. 'And I intend to feel every last sensation as I'm doing it.'

'The cave people,' said Rose. 'Go and join up with them.'

Quilley nodded his thanks to Rose for her advice. Then he looked her fur-bikinied body up and down and made an indescribably lustful noise.

'Oh, please,' said the Doctor. 'Now you've rediscovered human nature, can you hurry up and rediscover basic manners?'

'What are manners again?' asked Quilley. But the Doctor and Rose were already stepping back into the TARDIS. They had to go back to the 21st century and pick up Captain Jack, who had been babysitting a Neanderthal who was trapped in that time.

Like the scientists who couldn't travel to the future, Das couldn't travel to the past, and so Jack got the short straw of staying behind and educating him in the ways of the modern world.

Although Rose was glad she didn't get the gig, she was quite happy travelling on with the Doctor (even if she was forced into marriage and had her head cut off), but she did think that a time traveller from the 50th century was an odd choice to teach a Neanderthal how to live in the 21st.

Jack wouldn't argue with her on that. What he knew about the 21st century you could write on the back of a postage stamp. But he was smart and adaptable, and with the help of the internet, satellite television, and a make over that would have won him an award in a stylist competition, he'd turned Das into an integrated member of society.

Okay, he came over as a bit odd and eccentric, but he'd got a job as a labourer on a building site, and found a fiancée who only a mother (or another Neanderthal) could love. So, on the whole, he felt quite pleased with himself, and had a smug grin when the Doctor and Rose came to collect him.

'So how did you get on?' Rose asked as she came into the console room and gave Jack a hug. She'd been to her room and changed out of her cave girl outfit, and was now wearing her standard jeans, T-shirt and hoodie.

'I'll let you decide for yourself when you see him at the wedding,' he replied with his smug grin.

'A wedding!' the Doctor said from behind him, slapping him on the back. 'That's almost as quick as your courtship,' he said, grinning at Rose.

Jack frowned. 'Eh?'

Rose rolled her eyes; he'd let the sabre toothed cat out of the bag. 'Just as long as I don't have to wear that fur wedding outfit again.'

'What?' Jack was wondering just what he'd missed.

The woman at the front of the small function room settled her glasses on her nose. 'Good afternoon, everyone, my name is Lynette Coates. I am the Superintendent Registrar and I would like to welcome you all here today to celebrate the marriage of Anna Marie O'Grady and Das Dimitru.'

Jack looked across at the Doctor and Rose. The groom's side of the seating was empty but for them, alongside a huge Irish gaggle of O'Gradys.

'Next give me something hard to do,' he whispered.

The Doctor was leaning back in his chair, beaming.

Jack was stretched out like a cat, looking pleased with himself.

Rose couldn't take her eyes away from the linked hands of Das and his new wife. Jack had actually done it . . . amazing!


	13. Chapter 13

**Chapter 13**

There was a 300 mile diameter asteroid falling towards the TARDIS at 67,209 miles an hour. Fortunately, by design, the TARDIS was keeping ahead of it at exactly the same speed.

'Rose, see that knob?' the Doctor asked as he pointed to the section of the console she was standing in front of.

'Er…, yeah, I see it.'

'If the needle moves into the yellow, turn it anti-clockwise, if it moves into the red, turn it clockwise.'

'Yellow anti-clockwise, red clockwise, got it.'

'Jack, keep an eye on the power reserves, this is going to put a strain on the Old Girl and we may need to reroute power from other systems. Try and keep the Helmic Regulator supplied with 60% of the available reserves.'

'Okay Doc, I'm on it, you concentrate on the flyin', yeah?'

'Yeah, and remember, there are a trillion people on the surface relying on us to do this right, if we mess this up, it's bye bye Shallacatop.'

'No pressure then?' Rose said sarcastically.

The TARDIS was generating a massive gravity well that was drawing the rogue asteroid away from its collision with the planet Shallacatop and would drag it into the sun, so that it couldn't swing around and collide some time in the future.

The Time Rotor was grinding up and down, and the whole structure of the TARDIS was vibrating under the strain of maintaining a gravity field that would attract the huge mass of the asteroid. The Doctor was running around like a madman, cooing and coaxing the TARDIS to do her best.

After two hours, he checked the readings on the view screen, shut down the console and collapsed onto the jump seat with a sigh. 'That's it, we've done it! The stars gravity has captured the asteroid, its fate is sealed.'

Jack and Rose whooped and high fived each other. Rose joined the Doctor on the jump seat, held his hand, and rested her head on his shoulder. 'You must be knackered after all that runnin' about. Why don't you go through to the living room and I'll put the kettle on.'

'Good idea,' Jack said. 'I'll rustle up some sandwiches.'

In the sitting room, they enjoyed a cup of tea, except for Jack, who had coffee, and tucked into the sandwiches that Jack had prepared. Rose was catching up on the episodes of EastEnders that she'd missed, whilst laughing and chatting with 'the lads'.

'What's the status on the power reserves?' the Doctor asked Jack, as he finished off a cheese sandwich.

'We've got enough to roam about for a few days, but we'll need to stop off and fill the tank fairly soon.'

'Fill the tank?' Rose asked as she sipped her tea, she'd never considered that the TARDIS needed fuel.

'Yeah, normally the TARDIS balances the energy it uses with the energy it regenerates. What we've done today means that she doesn't have enough energy to regenerate, so any energy we use won't be replaced.'

Rose was a bit concerned, did this mean they could get stranded somewhere in time and space. 'Are we in trouble?'

The Doctor reached across the sofa and squeezed her hand in reassurance. 'Nah, we're fine, we just have to sit next to an energy source for a day or two, and the Old Girl will be fine.'

'What kind of energy does the TARDIS use?' Rose asked.

'Artron energy, it's a form of psionic/temporal energy that's the energy of thought and perception, it's the stuff of History itself,' he told her.

'And where do we get that from then, is there a filling station or somethin'?'

The Doctor gave a laugh. 'Yeah, there is, sort of. Black holes and other phenomena that warp space time generate Artron energy.' He looked at her and waggled his eyebrows. 'Any 'rift' in the fabric of time and space.'

Rose was processing what he had told her, and saw him grinning at her; he wanted her to make a connection, and suddenly the penny dropped.

'The Cardiff Rift! We can use the rift to refuel.'

'Exactly, and it beats being cooped up in here while we sit next to a black hole for two days.'

'Er…, excuse me,' Jack said. 'The Cardiff Rift?'

While they finished their drinks and sandwiches, the Doctor and Rose told Jack the tale of their trip to Cardiff and the Gelth that had tried to use the rift to invade the Earth.

'So we're goin' to be in Cardiff for a couple of days?' Rose asked. 'I need to make a phone call.' She felt it was time to be up front and honest with a certain someone.

While the Doctor went to land the TARDIS in Cardiff, Rose made her way to her room, took out her 'super phone' and speed dialled Mickey. It was time to do the decent thing and tell him that she was never going back to her old life on the estate, and she had to do it face to face . . . she owed him that much at least.

Mickey was in the pub with his mates from the garage, watching the match on the large screen TV. It was a lively atmosphere, as their team were winning two - nil at the moment. There was a loud 'YES!' as the keeper made a spectacular save.

Mickey's phone started ringing, and he looked at the display. He put his finger in one ear and put the phone to the other.

'Rose, Babe, where are you?'

'Mickey, can you hear me?' She could hear the noise in the pub in the background. 'We're in Cardiff for a coupla days. Can you swing by Mum's, pick up my passport and come and visit. It'd be really great to see you again.'

It was Rose, she was back, and she was asking to see him. She didn't say 'we need to talk', which would have meant 'I need to tell you we're finished', she said 'it would be great to see you again'.

'Yeah Babe, I'll book a ticket online as soon as I get home. I'll be on the first train in the mornin'. Where abouts are you in Cardiff?'

'We've landed in the Roald Dahl Plass, right next to that tall stone slab with the water pourin' down it.'

'Okay Babe, I'll see you there in the mornin', an' Rose…, I've missed you.'

'I've missed you too Mickey, see ya tomorrow.'

She went back to the living room, and found the Doctor and Jack chatting and laughing. The Doctor looked at her, his expression unreadable.

'Is your mum coming to visit by any chance?' That would be just what he needed, another slap and a telling off for keeping her daughter away from home.

'Nah, Mickey's comin' to bring my passport.'

'Hah, talk about a fool's errand, I told you, you don't need a passport out there,' he said. Rose knew that, but she wanted Mickey to have a purpose, a reason to come and visit her without feeling that he was just an obedient puppy obeying his mistress.

Jack couldn't help but notice the tension in the room.

'Who's Mickey?'

'Her/My boyfriend,' they said together.

"Boyfriend"? Jack thought to himself, "oh this is going to be good".

* * *

'Is that somebody knocking on the door?' Jack asked. He walked down the ramp and opened it. 'Who the hell are you?' he asked the young dark skinned guy standing outside the door.

'What do you mean, who the hell am I? Who the hell are you?' Mickey said in a confrontational tone.

'Captain Jack Harkness. Whatever you're selling, we're not buying,' Jack said, closing the door.

'Get out of my way!' Mickey said, pushing past him and heading up the ramp.

The Doctor was up a ladder, working on a conduit junction on the wall, while Rose was looking at something on the console with her back to him. She was wearing a denim outfit, mini skirt, and jacket, with black tights and boots. And she'd got her hair in pigtails, oh God; she looked hot and cute at the same time.

'Don't tell me, this must be Mickey,' Jack said.

'Here comes trouble!' the Doctor said from up the ladder. 'How're you doing, Ricky boy?'

'It's Mickey!'

Rose had left the console and came up to Mickey. 'Don't listen to him, he's winding you up.'

'You look fantastic.' Mickey gave her an appreciative look, and Rose grabbed him in a hug. The Doctor silently watched them from the ladder with a disapproving look on his face.

'Aw, sweet, look at these two. How come I never get any of that?' Jack was trying to break the ice and defrost the atmosphere.

The Doctor dragged his eyes away from Rose and Mickey. 'Buy me a drink first.'

'You're such hard work.'

'But worth it,' he grinned, turning back to the conduit to finish his work.

'Did you manage to find it?' Rose asked him.

Mickey reached inside his coat and took out her passport. 'There you go.'

The Doctor resumed his silent vigil from on high.

'I can go anywhere now.' She waved her passport at the Doctor with a smile.

'I told you, you don't need a passport.'

She looked at Mickey as she started to explain. 'It's all very well going to Platform One and Justicia and the Glass Pyramid of San Kaloon, but what if we end up in Brazil? I might need it.' She turned back to look at the Doctor and gave him her teasing smile. 'You see, I'm prepared for anything.'

Mickey's expression turned to disappointment. 'Sounds like you're staying, then.' Rose looked guilty, she'd been busted.

The Doctor had noticed that as well, it did sound like she was staying. His mood started to lighten at that news.

'So, what're you doing in Cardiff? And who the hell's Jumping Jack Flash? I mean, I don't mind you hanging out with big-ears up there.' He pointed up at the Doctor.

'Oi!' the Doctor protested.

'Look in the mirror. But this guy, I don't know, he's kind of….' Mickey struggled for the right description.

'Handsome?' Jack suggested.

'More like cheesy,' Mickey decided.

'Early twenty first Century slang. Is cheesy good or bad?' He was trying to remember what he'd taught Das the Neanderthal about early twenty first Century language.

'It's bad.'

'But bad means good, isn't that right?'

'Are you saying I'm not handsome?' the Doctor asked from up the ladder. Mickey had opened up a whole can of worms by mentioning the ears. He was still sensitive about the ears; there was a memory of a posh, gravelly voice asking for kinder ears.

Rose started to explain to Mickey. 'We just stopped off. We need to refuel. The thing is, Cardiff's got this rift running through the middle of the city. It's invisible, but it's like an earthquake fault between different dimensions.'

The Doctor scooted down the ladder, a spring back in his step now that he knew Rose was staying. 'The rift was healed back in 1869.'

'Thanks to a girl named Gwyneth, because these creatures called the Gelth, they were using the rift as a gateway, but she saved the world and closed it,' Rose told him.

Jack added his understanding of the concept. 'But closing a rift always leaves a scar, and that scar generates energy, harmless to the human race.'

'But perfect for the TARDIS,' the Doctor said. 'So just park it here for a couple of days right on top of the scar and….'

'Open up the engines, soak up the radiation.' That was Jack's turn.

'Like filling her up with petrol and off we go!' Rose points into the distance.

'Into time!' Jack's turn again.

'And space!' the three of them said together with a high five.

Mickey felt like the kid at school, who was always the last one to be picked for the team, the outsider. 'My God, have you seen yourselves? You all think you're so clever, don't you?'

'Yeah,' the Doctor said without hesitation.

Rose considered the question, grinned, and nodded. 'Yeah.'

Jack gave Mickey's cheek a friendly slap. 'Yep!'

* * *

Rose entered the TARDIS, the Doctor and Jack were at the console, preparing her for flight. 'We're all powered up. We can leave. Opening the rift filled us up with energy. We can go, if that's all right.' He could see that she'd been crying.

'Yeah, fine,' she answered distractedly. It was fair to say that the evening hadn't gone as planned. When she'd tried to tell Mickey that it was over, she'd chickened out. It just seemed so final.

The Doctor was feeling guilty about his behaviour to her boyfriend. 'How's Mickey?' he asked, trying to make amends.

'He's okay. He's gone,' she said quietly. Mickey had worked it out for himself after the rift had opened and she went running back to the TARDIS to help the Doctor.

'Do you want to go and find him? We'll wait.'

Jack deliberately gave him a questioning look, wondering what he was playing at. There was no room for Mickey here with these two making eyes at each other all the time, no matter how big the TARDIS was on the inside.

And when he'd challenged the Doctor about the view screen, he'd denied looking at anything, but he'd seen his expression. When the Doctor took Blon to dinner, it was a simple task to pull up the view screen logs and see what he was looking at, and yes, he'd been watching Rose and Mickey outside.

When Rose answered, she had come to a decision, or more accurately, Mickey had. 'No need. He deserves better.'

'Off we go, then. Always moving on,' he said with forced cheeriness.

'Next stop, Raxacoricofallapatorius. Now you don't often get to say that,' Jack quipped.

'We'll just stop by and pop her in the hatchery. Margaret the Slitheen can live her life again…, a second chance.'

'That'd be nice.' Rose just stood on the ramp, deep in thought.

A second chance, that's what Mickey had come to Cardiff hoping for, and Rose had invited him to show him that her life now, was travelling with the Doctor. She felt a sense of belonging here she'd never dreamed possible. She was content with her life on the TARDIS, that this was HER second chance.


	14. Chapter 14

**Chapter 14**

'I seek audience with the Raxacoricofallapatorius Government, under peaceful contract according to convention 15 of the Shadow Proclamation,' the Doctor said into the console communications equipment.

There was a long pause, and the Doctor just smiled at Rose and Jack, waiting not-so-patiently for a reply. He pressed the button and tried again.

'I seek audience with the Raxacorico….'

'Audience under convention 15 is granted,' a pleasant voice replied. 'May we ask who seeks audience?'

'I'm the Doctor, and I have two companions. May I also know who I am addressing?'

'I am Bratch Tel Tack Palsameer-Kai Jahbeen, attaché to the Minister of External Affairs…. Er, doctor who?'

'Just, the Doctor,' he said in his usual, cheerful style. 'We have something of yours, and we need to return it.'

'Really, what could an off-worlder have that belongs to us?'

'Er…, it's an egg,' the Doctor said hesitantly.

'Oh, how nice, you've brought breakfast,' Bratch said with pleasant sarcasm.

'No, no, you misunderstand. It's a Raxacoricofallapatorian egg…, y'know, one of your lot.'

'Oh!'

The Doctor landed the TARDIS in a designated area and met with Bratch Tel Tack Palsameer-Kai Jahbeen, and a delegation from the medical profession, who would take responsibility for the egg.

He explained that there had been…, 'an accident' with a complex alien machine, and the individual had been regressed to an egg.

'Do you know who it was?' Bratch asked, looking at the egg.

'Er, no, we never found out her name,' the Doctor lied. They didn't want the Slitheen family getting their hands on Blon and turning her into a homicidal maniac again. This was supposed to be her second chance, and they would give her the best chance they could.

'She just needs a kind and loving family to bring her up right,' Rose said with sincerity.

'Of course,' one of the doctors said. 'We will find adoptive parents for when she hatches, they will imprint on each other.'

'Right, now that's sorted, we'll be off then,' the Doctor said smiling and thrusting his hands in his jacket pockets.

'Won't you stay and enjoy our hospitality, as a thank you for your kindness,' Bratch said.

The Doctor and Rose visibly paled, and the Doctor gulped loudly. Jack, on the other hand, was smiling and looking forward to some Raxacoricofallapatorian hospitality.

Jack, being a fiftieth century guy, had an open mind about foreigners, and it was fair to say, very liberal views. He had only ever met Margaret, aka, Blon Fel Fotch Passameer-Day Slitheen, and although the Doctor and Rose had told him about her family's attempt to turn the Earth into radioactive fuel, speak as you find, she didn't seem that bad (apart from the smell, the farting, and wearing a dead woman's skin).

The Doctor and Rose on the other hand, had experienced the Slitheen in London trying to kill them, and the Blathereen on Justica trying to kill them. On the whole, their experience of the Raxacoricofallapatorians had not made a good impression.

The Doctor knew that under convention 15 of the Shadow Proclamation, they were quite safe. No one, and I mean no one, wants Jadoon troops stomping about their world causing all sorts of bother. They may not have been very bright, but they couldn't be bribed, couldn't be reasoned with, and couldn't be stopped from performing their duty.

'Er, no thanks,' the Doctor said, managing to force a smile on his lips. 'Must be going, things to do, places to be.'

'Very well, thank you again Doctor for your kindness.'

Jack looked disappointed, as they turned and headed back to the TARDIS. He was probably hoping to get another proverbial notch on the proverbial bedpost. (Well, he did have liberal views about foreigners)

* * *

Chips had been a mistake. Rose blamed the Doctor. He was used to this travelling lark. Other worlds, other times. He ought to have tipped her the wink, explained to her that chips here weren't chipped potatoes but chipped something-or-other-else. Some local vegetable, a bit too soft, a bit too blue, with an oily texture and a peppery aftertaste.

As she pushed her plate aside, though, she felt a familiar tingle. Sometimes it took just that sort of incidental detail to remind her how far she was from home; that she was breathing the air of the future. The air of another world.

Another world . . .

Rose still found it hard to take in, as if it was too much for her mind to process all at once and it would only let her focus on one thing at a time. It didn't help that this particular world was so human, so . . . mundane.

Crowded pavements littered with discarded wrappers, streets clogged with traffic, and the buildings . . . Almost without exception, they were concrete towers, devoid of character, no more than boxes to hold people. Like the ones on the estate back home, thought Rose, built before she was born. How disappointing!

It could almost have been London, or any big American city. Peering through the grease-streaked window beside their table, she eyed a line of cars simmering resentfully at a nearby junction.

She would hardly have been surprised to see a big red bus turning that corner. Look at the details, she thought. Like the menu, no thicker than a normal piece of cardboard and yet it projected life-sized aromagrams of its featured dishes.

And the way the cars floated over the roadway on air jets, churning the gravel beneath them. And the TV screens, as

flat as posters, seemingly attached to every available surface. It reminded her of the film "Bladerunner".

That had been her first impression of this place: newsreaders looking down at her from the sides of every building, their words subtitled so as not to be lost in the ever-present traffic grumble. There were two screens in the café itself, one behind Rose and one on the wall in front.

She kept finding her eyes drawn to this second one over Captain Jack's shoulder:

"Mr Anton Ryland the Sixth of Sector Four-Four-Kappa-Zero was celebrating today after a well-earned promotion. Mr Ryland, who has worked for the Office of Statistical Processing for thirty-seven years, is now a Senior Analytical Officer, Blue Grade. Commenting on his rapid rise, Mr Ryland said, 'It means I earn an additional 2.4 credits per day before tax, and my parking space –'."

The Doctor had been attacking his food with the same gusto with which he tackled Autons and Slitheen and other alien menaces. As he glanced up between forkfuls, though, his eyes followed Rose's gaze and his lips pulled into a grimace.

'Yeah, I know,' he said, 'not exactly "Man Bites Dog", is it? You want those chips?'

'Suits me to have a bit of downtime,' said Jack nonchalantly, biting into his burger – and Rose didn't even want to think about what manner of alien creature that might have come from. Those chips had opened up one hell of a mental can of worms.

Jack hadn't known the Doctor for as long as she had, but the lifestyle was nothing new to him. Born in the fifty-first century – allegedly – he claimed to have spent his life in the space lanes, even travelled in time. Of course, you couldn't always believe a word Jack said.

'Wouldn't wanna live here, though,' he continued in his American drawl. 'This must be the most boring planet in the universe!'

'Er, do you mind?' said the Doctor. 'I don't do "boring". There's something new and exciting to find on every world if you look for it.'

'Y'know,' Rose teased, 'I thought it was only in naff old films that people in the future wore those one-piece jumpsuits.'

'Yeah, I figure that's why they've been giving us the eye,' said Jack. 'Our gear.'

The Doctor frowned. 'They have?'

'A few of them, discreetly. They must think we're pretty eccentric.'

'A while since I've been called that,' said the Doctor.

'Hey, maybe there's a few credits to be made here. What do you say, Rose? Start this world's first fashion house. You design 'em, I flog 'em.'

'This is Rose's future,' the Doctor reminded Jack. 'I doubt she could show these people anything they haven't seen before, at some point in their history.'

'So the car-mechanic look is what?' said Rose. 'A fashion statement?'

'I'm more bothered about the time,' said the Doctor. 'I make it just gone –' he did his usual joke of glancing at his wristwatch – at least, Rose assumed it was a joke – '2775, but the technology here's still stuck in the twenty-seventh century. Earlier.' He sniffed the air thoughtfully.

'And?' Jack prompted.

'And that usually means trouble,' said Rose, relishing a chance to show off her experience. 'It means someone or somethin' is holdin' back progress, right, Doctor?'

'Maybe. Don't you think it's odd? That these people escaped Earth, found their brave new world, and all they've done is copy what they left behind?' He gave her no time to answer.

'How long do you think this city has been here? Long enough for the dirt to be ground in. Long enough to be bursting at the seams. But what have these people – what have any of them – done about it?' He raised his voice as he went on, as if personally accusing everyone at the neighbouring tables.

Rose leaned forward and spoke quietly, hoping to regain some measure of privacy. 'They are buildin', though. We saw builders on the way in. Remember, they used those floatin' disc things instead of scaffoldin'.'

'On car parks and squares.' The Doctor waved a dismissive hand. And I doubt there's a blade of grass left in this city.'

'He's right,' said Jack. 'They're bulldozing skyscrapers to replace them with bigger ones. Building upwards, not outwards. How much of this world did the TARDIS say was jungle, Doctor?'

'Over 90 per cent of its landmass – but we saw no sign of construction at the edge of the city as we came in.'

'The settlers must have cleared an area when they got here.'

'But they haven't expanded since then,' realised Rose. 'They're just . . . just tryin' to squeeze more people into the same space.'

'I think it's time we found out a few things about this place. Its name, for a start.' The Doctor twisted in his seat and spotted a middle aged woman leaving the table behind him.

She had just swiped a plastic card through some sort of a reader, and was fumbling to replace it in her hip pouch as she headed for the door. 'You look as if you could settle a bet for us,' he said. 'This planet, what's it called?'

Rose made a show of wincing and covering her eyes. Jack just grinned.

The woman was flustered. 'What is this? You trying to trick me?' She looked around suspiciously, as if expecting to see a camera.

Peering between her fingers, Rose saw the disapproving looks and despairing headshakes of the café's other customers.

'This is Colony World -Four,' said the woman. I know it by no other name and I'm sure I don't know what you're suggesting. Good day to you!' She barged past the Doctor and bustled out onto the street without a backward glance.

'You see?' said the Doctor triumphantly. 'Scratch the surface and there's usually something going on underneath. Fantastic!' He seized a handful of Rose's chips and stuffed them into his mouth. Then, catching her raised-eyebrow stare, he glanced around and mumbled, 'Oh, let them look. We're the most interesting people in this room.'

'You're mental, you are,' laughed Rose.

'Excuse me, gentlemen, lady. I'm afraid I must ask you to leave.' A man had appeared at the Doctor's elbow. He was short and stocky, his jumpsuit white instead of the usual grey. He held his head at a tilt and looked down his nose at them. 'Your appearance and behaviour are, ah, confusing my other patrons.'

'Confusing them?' The Doctor leaped on the words.

Rose didn't know whether to be angry or amused. 'We weren't disturbin' anyone.'

'You mean to say you're kicking us out for dressing a little differently?' said Jack.

'Listen, mate, this is hardly the Savoy!'

'Go now,' said the white-clad man sniffily, 'and I might overlook the fact that you were all heard lying on these premises.'

'It's all right,' said the Doctor quickly, leaping to his feet. 'Time we were off anyway. And you were right about the chips, Rose. They're rubbish.'

The manager cleared his throat meaningfully. 'There is the matter of your bill, sir.'

The Doctor patted down the pockets of his battered leather jacket, then shared an abashed look with his two friends. Meanwhile, the voice of the television newsreader boomed at them from each side:

"Mrs Helene Flangan is the luckiest woman in Sector One-Beta this evening. Usually, when the 31-year-old schoolteacher drives home from work in her seven-year-old 1.5g injection Mark 14.B family vehicle, the journey takes her an average of forty-two and a half minutes. Tonight, though, she made it in half that time. The reason? Every one of the traffic lights on her route showed green. Earlier, we asked Mrs Flangan what she did with the time she had saved. She spent it watching TV."


	15. Chapter 15

**Chapter 15**

Rose and Jack were in the Home for the Cognitively Disconnected; know to the fiction geeks as the Big White House. It turned out that people living on Colony World -Four were not allowed to use their imagination.

Jack had been brought here for telling stories of his adventures, in an attempt to find the leader of the fiction geeks. He had only just managed to escape a frontal lobotomy.

Rose arrived under her own steam with what she thought was the Doctor. He was pretending to be a 900 year old alien time traveller, and she was trying to get him sectioned. They let them in, but gave her a "shot" instead of the Doctor, which made him disappear . . . well, it made her imaginary Doctor disappear at least.

The real Doctor had arrived with Police Inspector Waller, whose mission appeared to be ridding the world of the subversive fantasy geeks. He was pretending to be a researcher for a television channel, which wanted to make a documentary about the police's fight against the fiction geeks ring leader, Hal Gryden.

But it wasn't a documentary he wanted to put on air, it was the truth he wanted to transmit to everyone in the city. He had taken one of the fiction geeks, Domnic Allen, to the TARDIS where he had found micro organisms that absorbed neuroelectro-chemical signals.

He'd given Waller the slip, and went to find Rose, while Jack had mobilised the inmates of the house into an army of defenders to man the barricades and keep the police out.

Rose was a few doors away, huddled up on a bed in the dark. The TV screen in her room had been smashed. She greeted the Doctor with a smile and a 'Hi', but neither reached as far as her eyes.

He was with her in two strides, enveloping her in a hug, assuring her that he was who he appeared to be and that she was safe now.

'You found the monsters, then?' she asked, forcing herself to sound cheerful but not quite succeeding.

'Oh yeah.' He tapped a forefinger against her temple. 'They're in here.'

Rose flushed. 'What's that s'posed to mean?'

The Doctor moved the finger to his own head. 'They're in here too. Micro-organisms in the air of this world. The settlers' equipment isn't sensitive enough to detect them and it's been a long time since they looked anyway.'

'Which means . . . what? We're all just breathin' 'em in?'

The Doctor grinned. 'Yeah. Hold on, here comes the science bit. These organisms feed off electrical activity in the atmosphere. They were probably quite happy till human beings came here and offered them something a bit tastier.'

'You mean our . . . brains? They're eatin' our brains?'

'Er, not quite. Just absorbing their neuroelectro-chemical signals. The right side of the adult human brain has the best flavour, apparently. It's like sugar to them. They've become quite the addicts, started colonising wholesale in there.' He tapped Rose's temple again.

'Trouble is, too much right-brain activity – dreams, for example – and they get bloated. The surplus impulses are reflected back where they came from, creating a feedback loop.' He was twirling his fingers in a hopeless attempt to demonstrate.

'The dreamer finds his dreams amplified over and over again until the right brain reacts to them as if they're real and communicates that information –' he clasped his hands together and described an arc through the air – 'to the left brain.'

'Left brain,' repeated Rose, still not quite following.

'Yeah. Logic, reasoning, language, all that stuff. And memory.'

'So that's why they . . . they kind of half froze my brain . . .'

'So you couldn't dream, yeah.'

'All the muscles down my left-hand side . . .'

'Right side of the brain controls the left side of the body.'

He now needed to tell the whole city about this, so that they could do something about it. There was a problem though. Waller would not want him to tell this lie, this fiction.

One major channel, apparently, had been taken off-air when its studios had been invaded. A police spokesperson was urging the public to remain calm, to stay in their homes – until he broke down in tears and confessed to the world that there was nothing he could do, that his force was outnumbered and that, contrary to his previous statements, the truth was that everyone was going to die.

The programme's editors cut back to a stunned newsreader who fiddled with her data pad and tried to think of something to say. She was spared the effort as her image suddenly crackled and died. There was a brief burst of static, then a new picture wobbled uncertainly into view.

The Doctor was out of focus at first, visible only from the neck down. He rushed forward until his navy-blue shirt filled the screen. He seemed to be having a row with the patient behind the camera; Rose cranked the volume up and heard muffled voices.

Blurred fingers clashed over the lens. Then the Doctor's face dropped into view, ridiculously huge, his nostrils gaping like caverns. He blinked, grinned and backed away until he was perched on his desk, now perfectly framed.

'Um, yeah, hi,' he said – and he smiled again, self-consciously.

Come on, Doctor, thought Rose, pull it together!

'You're watching Static,' said the Doctor, playing with his hands, 'broadcasting on all frequencies for . . . for as long as we can. I think you all know me, though I might not look quite as you imagined.'

Over the racket of the police raid, Rose could just make out the Doctor's voice: 'I'm Hal Gryden – and I've got something important to tell you.'

'I messed up,' the Doctor was broadcasting, more confident now, getting into his role. 'I've been telling you that fiction's good, and I stand by that. But I got one thing wrong. I was treating the symptoms, ignoring the cause.'

'There's no need to fight, no point. It's not what I wanted. I wanted you to dream of building, not of tearing things down.'

As the Doctor broadcast his message on the emergency network, Rose and Jack had been trying to hold back the police to buy him time. They had bought him ten minutes, but now the police had breeched their defences.

Rose raced into the small office, where a cop with pips on her shoulder and a uniform a bit too large for her was levelling a gun at the Doctor, who had stopped talking and was raising his hands.

'I trusted you,' spat Waller, 'and you were him all along. You lied to me!' Rose leaped onto her shoulders . . . to be thrown off with an almost casual shrug. She landed in a heap, found her arms pinned by two cops before she could stand again.

And there were many more cops streaming into the room, more guns aimed at the Doctor's head, and his hapless volunteer was wide-eyed with fear as he was wrenched away from his camera.

'Turn it off!' the cop with the pips ordered.

'Why?' asked the Doctor.

'Because we've all heard enough of your lies!'

'But you're here now. Inspector Waller to the rescue. The world is watching you. Your chance to fix everything; set the record straight.'

Waller hesitated, gesturing to the cop who had picked up the camera to stay his hand for now. She was thinking about it.

'You can be the one who tells them the truth,' said the Doctor. 'The whole truth and nothing but the truth.'

And he smiled past the cops at Rose.

'The only truth that needs telling here,' stormed Waller, 'is that you're fantasy crazy, the furthest gone I've ever seen! The people only have to look at you, Gryden. They only have to see what's happening out there.'

The Doctor shook his head. 'I didn't cause any of this. Pushed the process along, maybe, but . . .'

'It's your fault, you and your Static channel. The media is meant to inform, to educate. It tells us what's real, what we can believe. But you've corrupted it. You've used it to spread dissent and violence and fear!'

'Your people want change,' said the Doctor.

'Yeah,' piped up Rose. 'And if you'd listened to what the Doctor was sayin', you'd know –'

'I was calling for the violence to end. There's a better way.'

'Oh yeah, and don't we all know it!' spat Waller with distaste. 'Leave it to you, you'd have people dreaming as much as they like.'

'We all need dreams, Inspector Waller,' said the Doctor. 'Even you.'

Waller shook her head firmly. 'I'm happy with my real life, thank you. We've seen where your way leads. Everyone wanting different things, fighting for their own dreams.'

'Price you pay, I'm afraid. The freedom to hope, to imagine something better so you can make it real – worth it, believe me.'

Waller let out a hollow laugh. 'You're asking me to believe you?'

'Yeah. You're so concerned with the truth, aren't you?'

'It's all there is.'

'And what do your superiors think of that? Come on, Inspector Waller, why not talk to them? Find out what they think.'

'I don't have to. I know the law.'

'And the law never changes.'

'Right.'

'So prove it. Talk to them. Make me out to be a liar in front of the whole world.'

after a moment's indecision, Waller brought up her wrist and spoke into her vidcom. She asked somebody called Steel if he had heard, and requested instructions.

She nodded and grunted as she listened, and then thanked the person before turning to the Doctor triumphantly. 'You see now, Gryden? Do you see who the liar is?'

The camera zoomed in, to show that her vidcom was broken, blank, just the remnants of a shattered screen nestling in a mess of burnt-out circuitry.

'Yeah,' said the Doctor quietly. 'I think we all do.'

The other cops were shaken, unsure who to trust. They were wavering, some of them turning their guns on Waller herself.

'Course, I don't know the full story,' said the Doctor. 'I don't know where you got the uniform and the bike, but there's always a way if you want it badly enough. And of course, who'd question you? Who'd dare accuse a police officer of lying? Did the uniform come with the pips, by the way, or did you make them yourself, give yourself a promotion? How about the vidcom? Was it always broken, or did you break it yourself so you'd only hear the voices you wanted to hear?'

He shifted his gaze to Waller's colleagues. 'Anyone else heard of this "Steel"? No? I wonder – if "Inspector" Waller got away with it this long, how many more impostors are there out there? How many in this room?'

Waller had dropped her gun. She looked as if the life had drained out of her. She was muttering something feebly. Sound technicians had worked hard to decipher the words, so that they could be subtitled.

She was saying, 'I didn't mean to . . . I was only trying to put things right, fight the monsters . . .'

But the Doctor didn't let up. 'Ironic, isn't it, "Inspector", that you've spent so long denying other people their dreams – and all that time you were living all yours!'

The cops had gathered their thoughts now and command had passed without discussion to a short, stocky man with sergeant's stripes. At his signal, they moved in and seized the Doctor, Rose and Waller. None of them resisted.

A black-gloved hand closed over the lens of the camera, blocking its view of the scene – and a moment later, it went dead. But by then, of course, it was far too late.

* * *

Domnic Allen hurried through the jungle, not caring about a few scratches this time. Every so often he thought he could hear voices ahead of him. He dismissed them as products of his imagination, before realising that they were real.

He reached the blue cabinet just as its door shut with a final sounding thud. He ran up to it but didn't know what to do. Cry out? Knock on the door? What would he say if somebody answered?

He walked round the box, staring at it, agonising over his indecision. He completed his circuit and was surprised to find Rose Tyler in front of him.

'Hi.'

'Er, hi,' Domnic stammered. 'I just . . . I didn't want to . . . I felt . . .'

'I know. Sorry 'bout sneaking off like that. The Doctor's not keen on goodbyes.' Domnic didn't said anything, so Rose continued, 'I think it's all the adoration – makes him a bit embarrassed.'

Captain Jack popped his head out of the door. 'You ask me, he's missing out on the best bit. Why else put our necks on the line, if not for the adoration? Coming, Rose?'

'OK, yeah.'

Jack glanced at Domnic. 'Listen, mate, the Doctor said you should try to re-establish contact with other human worlds, get them to send you all the fiction they have. He said you've got so much to look forward to: Hitchcock, Proust, Blyton, Dennis the Menace.' And then he disappeared again.

'No, really,' Rose laughed, 'that's what he said: Dennis the Menace.'

Domnic swallowed. 'Will I . . . Will we see you again?'

'Doubt it,' she said regretfully. Then, turning back to the cabinet, she paused and added, 'Well . . . maybe in your dreams.'

Then she darted forward, kissed Domnic quickly on the cheek and disappeared with a wink and a grin. She walked up the ramp to the console, where the Doctor was starting up the Time Rotor, filling the room with that wonderful sound.

'So, where are we off to next then?' she asked him.

The Doctor straightened up and frowned in thought, before raising his eyebrows and smiling. 'I know, I've just had an urge to go somewhere.'

'An urge?' said Rose. 'That sounds interestin'.'

'Where is it then?' Jack asked.

'Let's go to the wardrobe and I'll give you a clue,' the Doctor said mysteriously.


	16. Chapter 16

**Chapter 16**

 **Kyoto, Japan.**

 **Muromachi Period 1336.**

Rose entered the console room, having come from the clothing department that the Doctor called the wardrobe. The Doctor and Jack turned to look, and their mouths fell open.

'Have I put all this on right,' she asked, holding her arms out so that the voluminous sleeves hung down. 'The instructions said that the belt thing has to dangle down the back in Kyoto.'

She was dressed in a traditional Kimono of the Muromachi period, and the 'belt thing', the obi, was a wide sash around her middle. She wore bright red lipstick, and her pale complexion meant that she didn't need the white face powder, that was common among the women of this period. Her blonde hair was styled up on her head in an imitation of the traditional style.

'Oh wow!' Jack said, giving her a wolf whistle as she did a turn.

The Doctor gave her an appreciative smile. 'You look beautiful, and that blonde hair will make you the talk of Kyoto.'

'You don't look half bad yourself,' Rose replied. They'd been to the wardrobe and managed to dress quickly, wearing the male montsuki version of the kimono, which was black, with a haori half coat, and a culotte-like hakama.

None of them were wearing the traditional geta sandals, opting instead to wear their trainers, just in case.

'Now, remember, this is feudal Japan, and etiquette is everything, so remember to bow. We are going to meet General Ashikaga Takauji, one of the main players in Kyoto.'

'Will it be safe with all those Samurai around, carryin' those sharp swords?' Rose asked.

'Very,' the Doctor said. 'They have a code of conduct, and do not use their swords lightly. In fact the Samurai are very cultured and enjoy all the arts.'

'I can't wait to meet the geisha's,' Jack said with a wicked grin.

The Doctor started to chuckle as though he'd heard a private joke. 'You do that Jack, just don't get us all arrested.' He tried to contain his laughter as he said, 'Just remember to bow,' and burst out laughing again.

'O-kay,' Jack said, looking puzzled. 'Are we ready then?'

Rose trotted to the Doctor in her kimono and whispered in his ear. 'What's so funny?'

The Doctor looked at her with mirth. 'Geisha literally translates as 'performing artist'; you'll notice it doesn't specify what sex the artist is.'

'But geisha are women, right?'

'In this period, they are more commonly called taikomochi, or 'jester', and are male. It wasn't until the 1700's that the onna geisha or female artist first appeared.'

'So that means that….' Rose exploded in a fit of giggles. 'Knowing Jack, he'll adapt.'

Arm in arm, they set off down the ramp to join Jack at the doors, where Jack opened the one side and stepped outside.

The TARDIS had landed in a courtyard garden of a Zen temple, where an old, grey haired, puzzled looking gardener/monk was looking at them. Rose was looking around at the beautiful, traditional architecture.

'Oh this is beautiful,' she breathed.

The Doctor walked up to the monk and bowed. 'Greetings kind sir, please forgive the intrusion into your sanctuary. We are travellers from afar, visiting your beautiful city, and are searching for the esteemed General Ashikaga Takauji.'

'Good day to you all, you have an interesting shrine there,' he said with a smile. 'General Takauji will be in his residence at the barracks.'

'Thank you kind sir,' the Doctor said, as he bowed again.

They passed through the ornate archway, and walked down the main road of the city, towards the barracks. Rose's blonde hair, and their European features caused a number of curious looks from local residents who were out and about on this pleasant, spring morning.

'So tell me, why are we here, in 14th century Kyoto?' Rose asked, as she bowed politely to an elderly woman who was looking at her blonde hair in amazement.

'Swordsmanship,' he said simply. 'Every so often I get feelings, urges to do something. I've learnt to take notice of these feelings, because they are usually essential to my continued survival.'

'And you feel the need to learn how to use a sword?' Jack asked suspiciously. From what he'd seen of the Doctor so far, he seemed to be more of a pacifist, than a warrior, and he was right, for this incarnation. If he'd have met him a few months ago, he would have seen a man who was as ruthless as any Japanese shogun.

'I already know how to use a sword, I've had lessons from some of the best swordsmen in Europe, broadsword, sabre, foil, but the samurai, they've taken swordsmanship and turned it into an art form.'

At the gates to the barracks, two soldiers stood guard in the traditional samurai armour, made from lacquered leather, and wearing iron kabuto helmets. They each held a naginata, a glaive like weapon, which consisted of a pole with a curved blade mounted on top.

The Doctor approached the guards, who were regarding them with suspicion due to their non Japanese features. 'Hello, I'm Ishi, and this is Rōzu and Jakku,' he said with a bow, indicating Rose and Jack with a sweep of his arms.

'Ishi who?' one of the guards asked.

'Just Ishi,' he replied in his usual, cheerful manner. 'Zen master and intellectual Musō SosekiI tells me that General Takauji keeps his cool in battle and is not afraid of death, that he is merciful and tolerant, and that he is very generous with those below him. I have come a long way in the hope of studying kenjutsu under such a man.'

'I will speak with the general,' one of the guards said, giving a curt bow, the Doctor returned the bow.

The compliment and praise lavished on the general had the desired effect. The guard returned and escorted the group to the general's house, which was of the typical wood and paper construction. In a room, that would probably be called the living room in a western house, an impressive man sat crossed legged on cushions.

Ashikaga stood and bowed to his guests. 'Ishi, you honour me with your wish to study under me,' he said with a warm smile. He had shoulder length black hair, with a moustache and goatee beard. His eyes were dark, but full of warmth and humour.

'And this must be Rōzu, your 'one who remains at home'. My lady, you have a rare beauty, the likes of which my eyes have not seen before.'

'Thank you sir,' Rose said with a bow. She made a mental note to ask the Doctor what 'one who remains at home' meant. The TARDIS had obviously translated it literally, and she had a feeling she wasn't going to like it.

'Is Jakku your servant or bodyguard,' Ashikaga asked.

Jack gave a laugh as he bowed. 'They wish; I'm a friend and travelling companion.'

'So, Doct…, er, Ishi, what do me an' Jack do while you're tryin' to chop each other to pieces?' Rose asked.

'You can call me Doctor, Ishi is Japanese for doctor, and you can go shopping if you want to.'

Rose's face lit up. 'Shoppin', really? Brilliant!'

'And I presume you have some good taverns in Kyoto?' Jack asked the general.

Ashikaga gave a single laugh. 'We do indeed, I will assign one of my lieutenants to escort you and show you around. He will also deter unwanted attention; we don't see many foreigners in Kyoto.'

'Thank you general, that will allow me to not worry about Rōzu, and focus on the training.' He turned to Rose and Jack, gave them a cheeky grin, and bowed. 'See you two later then, and Jack . . . stay out of trouble.'

* * *

Ashikaga led the Doctor to the dojo, the training hall where the soldiers practiced their fighting skills. When they entered the dojo, the soldiers stopped and bowed respectfully to their commander.

'Carry on with your practice,' he said, returning the bow. He went over to a rack by the wall, and selected two wooden swords.

'These are bokutō, and will allow us to practice tactics without causing serious injury. Have you any experience with the sword?'

'Yes, two handed and single,' the Doctor replied.

'Excellent; that gives me something to work with.'

He handed the Doctor one of the bokutō and moved to a clear area of the dojo. They bowed to each other and took their fighting stances. Ashikaga started to correct the Doctor's stance and footwork, improving his balance and manoeuvrability.

They then started to trade blows.

'CLACK', 'CLACK', 'CLACK'.

The black oak swords swung around in attack and defence, as both men tried to get the advantage.

'That is very good Ishi, you have been taught well. However, I sense much thought in what you do. In combat, samurai live in the moment, they do not think about victory or defeat, they do not think at all, they become one with the sword, and the sword leads their actions.'

"Live in the moment?" the Doctor thought, "I can do that, better than any human". He was remembering the engine room on Platform One, where he had moved outside of time to pass through a rotating fan.

He took his fighting stance again and smiled at Ashikaga. His intense, blue eyes had an other-worldly look about them, before he closed them.

Ashikaga was ready, but puzzled; what was this foreigner doing?

He suddenly got his answer, as the Doctor started the training session again, this time with his eyes closed.

'CLACK', 'CLACK', 'CLACK' . . .. 'CLACKITY-CLACKITY-CLACK'.

The rest of the dojo stopped their training to watch the spectacle, as their general fought a man who apparently had his eyes closed. This level of skill was rarely seen, and never to this degree. The two men stopped, and the Doctor opened his eyes and smiled at Ashikaga, who was wide eyed in amazement and admiration.

'Extraordinary! You are certainly a quick learner Ishi. I wonder how far your skill extends; do you think you could tackle more than one opponent?'

The Doctor looked around the dojo at the other men. 'Let's find out. If we start with one extra, and then add more as you see fit, I think that would be a good test.'

'Very well,' Ashikaga said. He looked around the room, until he saw who he was looking for, one of his lieutenants, who he knew was an excellent swordsman. He nodded to him, and the young man stepped forward. The three men bowed, took their ready positions, and the Doctor closed his eyes, his face becoming a mask of calmness.

'CLACKITY-CLACKITY-CLACK'. The training started, and strike after strike was blocked or parried. Ashikaga nodded to another man, who joined in, then another, and another. The Doctor's brow started to furrow as his mask of calmness started to fade.

'You are thinking again Ishi, your sword knows what to do, trust it, it will not fail you,' Ashikaga encouraged.

His brow un-furrowed, and instead of a mask of calmness, it went deeper, his face became serene, tranquil. Ashikaga was reminded of moonlight dancing on the surface of a midnight lake. There was a point where all five of them paused, and the Doctor lowered his bokutō. He straightened up and opened his eyes, turning to smile at the astonished men around him. Each in turn bowed deep and reverently to this master of the sword.

'Thank you Ash that has been very helpful. I don't know why, or when, but I am sure that will come in useful very soon,' the Doctor said with a smile.

'It has been an honour to train with such an accomplished master of the sword.' Ashikaga bowed deep, and the Doctor reciprocated.

'Now, let's have some tea,' the Doctor said cheerfully. 'I take it you have someone who knows the ceremony.'

Ashikaga laughed and slapped him on the back. 'Of course, she who remains at home, my wife is very skilful.'

Back in the living room, the Doctor was kneeling at a low table opposite Ashikaga. A woman, dressed in the same fashion as Rose, entered with a tray and placed it on the table. The Doctor bowed to her respectfully, and she proceeded to perform the ritual tea ceremony.

When the ceremony was over, and the tea poured, they knelt there drinking the flowery tea, whilst discussing the in's and out's of various styles of swordsmanship. The Doctor had just finished his tea, when one of the guards from the gate, hurried apologetically into the room.

'General, forgive my intrusion,' he said breathlessly, he'd obviously been running. 'There has been some trouble at a tavern in the town.'

"Jack!" the Doctor thought immediately. He may be wrong, and he would apologise to Jack later if he was, but…, well, Jack was Jack. He rose with Ashikaga and headed quickly for the door. They hurried across the courtyard of the barracks and through the gates.

The first thing he saw, that made him laugh, was Rose, with her kimono hitched up around her thighs. He took a moment to admire those young, fit thighs as they pumped away as hard as they could.

The second thing was even funnier. Jack had his montsuki held up between his legs like an oversized nappy, and he was on the heels of Rose as they ran up the road towards him.

The Doctor knew a quick exit when he saw one, and he was looking at one right now. He turned to Ashikaga and grinned. 'It has been a pleasure training with you Ash, and I get the feeling that if we leave now, I can save you some embarrassment. Goodbye and thank you.'

His timing was perfect; he bowed to Ashikaga, turned, and started to run just as Rose and Jack passed him. Ashikaga looked on in speechless, amused, astonishment.

'Do you want to tell me why I'm running?' the Doctor asked Jack with a grin.

Jack was breathless. 'I only said 'hello' to one of the serving girls,' he said, looking over his shoulder at the mob of locals who were shaking their fists, sticks, and disturbingly, some swords.

They skidded quickly into the tranquil grounds of the Zen temple, which was about to become a whole lot less tranquil, and rushed to the TARDIS.

'To be fair though,' Rose gasped as the Doctor put his key in the lock. 'Sayin' hello wasn't the problem.'

The door burst open and they fell forwards on to the floor grating in fits of laughter. They heard the muffled 'thump' and 'oof' of bodies hitting the TARDIS door, followed by 'get off' and you're crushing me', as other bodies pushed forward.

'So what exactly WAS the problem?' the Doctor asked with raised eyebrows, talking like a headmaster to a disruptive pupil.

'Oh let me,' Rose said with a giggle, her eyes sparkling with mirth. 'Y'know what it's like when lads get the ale down their necks an' start chattin'? Well, Jack just happened to brag that he wouldn't mind beddin' a couple a geishas, if ya know what I mean?' She tapped the side of her nose and winked in an imitation of Jack.

'What's so wrong with that?' Jack asked in all innocence.

The Doctor and Rose just looked at each other, and suddenly exploded into fits of uncontrollable laughter. With tears in their eyes, they picked themselves up off the floor and headed for the console. The Doctor started up the Time Rotor, before they all went to get changed.

The Doctor returned to the console room wearing his usual 'man in black' outfit with the 'cool' leather jacket, while Jack was wearing jeans and T-shirt. Rose appeared a short while afterwards, wearing black trousers, and a dark pink zip up top with 'Punky Fish' on the back, over a white vest top.

Jack was still a bit miffed that they hadn't told him about geishas being male in the fourteenth century; he'd have been a lot more subtle if he'd have known, and they wouldn't have been run out of town by a lynch mob.

The Doctor and Rose were still laughing about that, and Jack finally gave up trying to be annoyed at them and laughed himself, it would be just the kind of stunt he would pull himself. As they laughed together, the walls of the TARDIS seemed to get brighter, and the Doctor, Rose, and Jack seemed to drift away from each other, without actually moving.


	17. Chapter 17

**Chapter 17**

The Doctor woke up in a spinning room…, no he was spinning, and the room was still…, no, actually, nothing was spinning, except his head. He tried to stand, and the room, he, his head started spinning again.

'What is it? What's happening?' He continued to spin until he found a door and fell through it.

'Oh, my God! I don't believe it! Why'd they put you in there? They never said you were coming,' a young woman said as she stooped down and tried to help him up.

'What happened? I was….' He stumbled again as the larger room now started to spin.

The young woman tried to support him but he fell again. 'Careful now. Oh! Oh, mind yourself! Oh, that's the transmat. It scrambles your head. I was sick for days.' She helped him up again. 'All right? So, what's your name then, sweetheart?'

That was a very good question, who was he? 'The Doctor . . . I think. I was, er…, I don't know, what happened? How….'

'You got chosen.'

'Chosen for what?'

'You're a housemate. You're in the house. Isn't that brilliant?!' the young woman enthused.

'That's not fair. We've got eviction in five minutes! I've been here for all nine weeks, I've followed the rules, I haven't had a single warning, and then he comes swanning in,' a young man said from the sofa.

'If they keep changing the rules, I'm going to protest, I am. You watch me, I'm going to paint the walls,' a young dark skinned woman said.

Suddenly a robotic female voice came from the ceiling. 'Would the Doctor please come to the Diary Room?' So, somebody knows who he is, that was a start. The young woman indicated a door with the stylised eye on it, so he opened it and went in. There was a single comfy chair in the middle of the small cubicle, so he sat down.

The robotic voice spoke again. 'You are live on channel forty four thousand. Please do not swear.'

Hang on; this was like that daft TV show that Jackie used to tell Rose about. ROSE! he was travelling with Rose…, and Jack. His memory was returning.

He looked at the camera in front of him. 'You have got to be kidding.'

* * *

Rose came to on a cold, shiny black floor in a large, dimly lit room; a dark skinned man was leaning over her.

'What happened?' she asked him.

He smiled at her knowingly. 'It's all right, it's the transmat, does your head in…. Get a bit of amnesia . . .. What's your name?'

Hang on, she knew that one. 'Rose. But where's the Doctor?'

The man ignored her question. 'Just remember, do what the android says. Don't provoke it. The android's word is law.'

What the hell was he on about? 'What do you mean android? Like a robot?' She was suddenly aware that there were a lot of other people in the room, she could hear them. Was she in some kind of factory?

'Positions, everyone! Thank you!' an officious woman said.

The man pulled her up to her feet. 'Come on, hurry up. Steady, steady.'

Ooh, the room was spinning. 'I was travelling, with the Doctor and a man called Captain Jack. The Doctor wouldn't just leave me,' she told him.

'That's enough chat. Positions! Final call! Good luck!' the officious woman's voice said.

Rose was definitely confused. 'But I'm not supposed to be here.'

'It says Rose on the podium, the man said. 'Come on.'

What the hell? He was right, that was her name on the podium. And the podium, it looked very familiar, it looked like…. 'Hold on, I must be going mad. It can't be. This looks like the….'

'Android activated!' the officious voice said.

'Oh, my God, the android. The-Anne-droid.'

The android spoke. 'Welcome to the Weakest Link!'

* * *

Jack could hear echoey voices in his head. 'Here we go again. We've got our work cut out for us.'

Urgh, she sounded all scratchy and mechanical.

'I don't know. He's sort of handsome. Has a good lantern jaw.'

That was a different scratchy voice, but at least she had good taste.

'Lantern jaws are so last year,' the first scratchy voice (with no taste) said.

Jack felt that he had stopped rotating, and cautiously opened his eyes. He could see two, white robots either side of the couch he was lying on.

'Sorry, but . . . nice to meet you, ladies, but where exactly am I?' he asked, trying to remember where he'd actually come from.

'We're giving you a brand new image,' scratchy voice one said.

His memory started to filter back. 'Oh, hold on, I was with the Doctor.' Hang on, did she say 'brand new image'? 'Why, is there something wrong with what I'm wearing?'

'It's all very twentieth century. Where did you get that denim?' number two said.

Of course it's twentieth century, that's when I got it. 'A little place in Cardiff. It was called…, the Top Shop.'

'Ah! Design classic,' two said.

'But we're going to have to find you some new colours. Maybe get rid of that Oklahoma Farm Boy thing you've got going on,' one said.

The two robots stood either side of a gun-like device on a tripod. 'Just stand still and let the Defabricator work its magic,' two said.

'What's a defabricator?' Jack asked, thinking that he might be about to dissolve into his constituent atoms. A blue beam of energy surrounded his body, and his clothes started to disappear.

'Okay. Defabricator. Does exactly what it says on the tin. Am I naked in front of millions of viewers?'

'Absolutely!' the two robots said together.

"Result!" Jack thought with a grin. 'Ladies, your viewing figures just went up.'

* * *

 **Clifton** **Parade, Peckham, London.**

 **Wednesday 6th September 2006.**

Mickey Smith was on his day off from the garage where he worked as a mechanic. He was heading for the local Tesco Express to stock up on some essentials, bread, milk, tea, beer. It was mid morning, and the estate was quiet, not much traffic about, and people were either at work, or indoors, watching daytime TV.

He thought he heard the breeze whistling around the flats, the tall buildings tending to funnel the wind and concentrating it through the courtyards.

Except it was a warm, still day, and it wasn't wind he could hear, it was…. 'Oh my God, it's Rose!'

He turned and started to run back to the flats, the direction that the wheezing, grinding noise was coming from. No one else who was out and about seemed to notice the noise, only Mickey, who had been inside the TARDIS, and now had a connection with the ancient ship.

He turned the corner at a run and saw the familiar blue box at the end of the road. As he ran towards it, the door opened, and a familiar figure stepped out. It was Rose, she was home, and oh God, he'd missed her.

'I knew it! I was all the way down Clifton Parade, and I heard the engines. I thought, there's only one thing that makes a noise like that,' he said as he ran across the road towards her. He slowed to a standstill as he saw her face; something was wrong, very wrong. 'What is it?'

Rose couldn't speak, she was too emotional, and she wrapped her arms around his neck, buried her head in his shoulder, and started to cry.

'Babe? What's up, where's the Doctor?' He was rubbing her back, trying to comfort her.

'Oh Mickey…, He's gonna die, an' he's sent me away cos he wants me safe,' she sobbed.

'Bloody 'ell,' is all he could think of saying. Jackie will be over the moon that he sent her back. 'C'mon Babe, let's get you home and you can tell me all about it.' He put an arm around her shoulders and gently herded her in the direction of Bucknall House.

At the door of the flat that used to be her home, and was now destined to be again, she put the key in the lock and turned it.

'Who the hell's that?' Jackie's voice asked from inside.

'Jackie, it's me, Mickey, I've got Rose here.'

'ROSE!' Jackie squealed, as she came running out of the kitchen. 'Oh sweetheart, you should have phoned ahead, I'd 'ave got things ready for ya.' She enveloped Rose in a big, motherly hug. When she felt Rose cling onto her in desperation, she sensed something was wrong.

'Sweetheart, what's wrong?' She held Rose by the shoulders and looked into her tear filled eyes. 'Where's the Doctor?' She looked up at Mickey, who silently shook his head to say 'not now'.

'Oh God no, Rose I'm so sorry.' She hugged her again and rubbed her back, trying to rub away the pain and sorrow she could feel in her daughter. 'Come and sit down, I'll put the kettle on.'

"Mum's answer to everything", she thought, "a cup of tea", but it wouldn't fix this, nothing would.

Jackie made the tea, and coaxed the story of the Game Station out of Rose. What could she say? That amazing alien had kept his promise and sent her daughter home to her.

After telling her story, and getting through half a box of tissues, Rose just sat there in the living room, numb. She looked around the familiar surroundings that had been her life for nineteen years, before she went off to travel the universe. And now, here she was, a year later…, no, two years, because the TARDIS had brought them back a year late to deal with the Slitheen.

So how old was she now? To her, she was twenty, but to everyone else, she was twenty one. If she hadn't been so sad, she would have laughed when she thought that Mum would love being a year younger.

['Have a good life, do that for me, Rose, have a fantastic life.'] She saw his holographic face in her mind and his last message.

How could she have a fantastic life here? She couldn't do that for him, because she couldn't do it without him. She belonged on the TARDIS, standing by his side, hand in hand. Oh the feeling she got every time he held her hand. She was going to miss that.

She was bought out of her reverie by Mickey gently reaching for her hand. 'C'mon Rose, yer Mum hasn't got much in, so we're goin' down the cafe for lunch.'

'Wha? Oh, I don't….'

'No buts young lady, yer comin' with us,' Jackie said in a 'mother will stand no nonsense' tone of voice. Between them, they hauled her to her feet and shepherded her out of the flat. She meekly did as she was told, still too shocked, and dazed to put up a fight.

['And I bet you're fussing and moaning now. Typical.'] Not anymore she wasn't, all the fight had been knocked out of her, the fire was extinguished.

In the cafe, they were sitting at the Formica covered tables, eating out of the recyclable plastic cartons. 'And it's gone up market, this place. They're doing little tubs of coleslaw, now. It's not very nice. It tastes a bit sort of clinical,' Jackie said, trying to have a normal everyday conversation for her daughter's sake.

Mickey picked up the baton, seeing what she was doing. 'Have you tried that new pizza place down Minto Road?'

'What's it selling?'

'Pizza!' Mickey said in disbelief.

'That's nice. Do they deliver?' she asked.

'Yeah.'

Jackie could see that her ploy wasn't working. 'Oh, Rose, have something to eat,' she encouraged.

'Two hundred thousand years in the future, he's dying, and there's nothing I can do,' Rose told them.

'Well, like you said two hundred thousand years. It's way off,' Jackie replied, but Rose had a different perspective on it, she'd been there in the here and the now (or the there and then).

'But it's not. It's now. That fight is happening right now, and he's fighting for us, for the whole planet, and I'm just sitting here eating chips,' she said angrily. She wasn't angry with her mum, or Mickey, she was angry with the Doctor for sending her away, and she was angry with herself for being so impotent and useless.

Jackie, though felt that Rose's anger was directed at her and responded. 'Listen to me. God knows I have hated that man, but right now, I love him and do you know why?' Her voice cracked with emotion. 'Because he did the right thing, he sent you back to me.'

It was difficult to explain to her mum and Mickey, what it was like to travel the stars, until you experience it, it isn't real. 'But what do I do every day, Mum? What do I do? Get up, catch the bus, go to work, come back home, eat chips, and go to bed? Is that it?'

'It's what the rest of us do,' Mickey said, not really understanding her point.

'But I can't!' She shouted, she'd done that at Henrick's, and even then she'd felt she could do more.

'Why, because you're better than us?' Mickey asked, perhaps with some bitterness, after all, it was the Doctor that had stolen away his girlfriend.

That hurt Rose; she had never thought she was better than anyone. She had lived her life on a council estate; you only had to look at her room to see that she was no better than anyone else.

'No, I didn't mean that,' she shouted back. 'But it was…, it was a better life. And I don't mean all the travelling and seeing aliens and spaceships and things. That don't matter. The Doctor showed me a better way of living your life.'

She looked at Mickey. 'You know…, he showed you too. That you don't just give up.' She started to bang the table with her hand. 'You don't just let things happen. You make a stand. You say no. You have the guts to do what's right when everyone else just runs away, and I just can't.'

Rose stood up and ran out of the cafe. Jackie looked at Mickey sitting next to her and felt for him. He was still in love with Rose, and couldn't accept that Rose had moved on.

'I think you hurt her then,' she said.

Mickey was silent for a while; his emotions were all over the place. Eventually though, he knew Jackie was right, he'd hurt the girl he loved, and it wasn't her fault.

'Yeah, I'd better go an' find her, say sorry.' He stood and left the cafe, heading after her.

He found her sitting on a metal bench in the recreation area of the estate. 'You can't spend the rest of your life thinking about the Doctor.'

'But how do I forget him?' she asked. How does she forget a man who has shown her so much?

Mickey took this opportunity to make his move, it was now or never. 'You've got to start living your own life. You know, a proper life, like the kind he's never had. The sort of life that you could have with me.'

"That's what he was on about in that message", she thought. ['Have a good life, do that for me, Rose, have a fantastic life.']

While she thought about the message, and what Mickey had said, what he was offering her, she noticed some large letters chalked into the asphalt of the play area, letters that she had seen before. As she walked up to it, she noticed the graffiti on the walls.

'Over here,' she shouted and then looked at another wall. 'It's over here as well!'

Mickey couldn't understand what she was getting excited about. 'That's been there for years. It's just a phrase. It's just words.'

'I thought it was a warning. Maybe it's the opposite. Maybe it's a message. The same words written down now and two hundred thousand years in the future. It's a link between me and the Doctor. Bad Wolf here, Bad Wolf there,' she said as she started to run.

'But if it's a message, what's it saying?' he called after her.

'It's telling me I can get back. The least I can do is help him escape.'

They ran back to the TARDIS and went inside.

'All the TARDIS needs to do is make a return trip. Just reverse,' she reasoned.

'Yeah, but we still can't do it.'

'The Doctor always said the TARDIS was telepathic. This thing is alive. It can listen,' she told him.

'It's not listening now, is it?'

'We need to get inside it. Last time I saw you, with the Slitheen, this middle bit opened, and there was this light, and the Doctor said it was the heart of the TARDIS. If we can open it, I can make contact. I can tell it what to do.'

Mickey had a bad feeling about that. 'Rose.'

'Mmm?' She was deep in thought, trying to think of a way to get inside the TARDIS console.

'If you go back, you're going to die.'

'That's a risk I've got to take.' She couldn't look him in the eye. 'Because there's nothin' left for me here,' she told him. Over the last few months, she'd faced death more than once, and although she didn't want to die, she'd learnt that sometimes you had to make a stand.

Once again, Mickey was hurt by what she'd said. 'Nothin'?'

'No.'

Well, that was that. It told him everything he needed to know, and didn't want to know. There was nothing here for her, not even him, it was over. He knew her well enough to know that when her mind was made up, nothing could change it. So it was time to stop being her lover, and be her friend.

'Okay, if that's what you think, let's get this thing open.'

'Do you think we could pull it open?' he asked her.

'I don't know, last time it just kinda opened itself.'

'I've got an idea Babe; I'm goin' to get my car.'

He returned a few minutes later in his Mini, with a heavy chain from the garage where he worked.

'There ya go Rose, fix this hook onto the console, I'll fix the other end to the tow hitch.'

As Mickey was lying on the floor, attaching the chain, he saw a pair of legs standing close by.

'Watcha doin'?' Jackie asked from above.

'Tryin' to help Rose get back to the Doctor.'

Jackie's heart went into her mouth; Rose had said the Doctor was dying, what happened if she made it back, would she die too?

'Mickey, tell me honestly, is there any chance you can do it?'

'Honestly, I don't know Jackie. This thing is so alien and so complex…, I doubt it, but I do know that Rose won't rest until we've tried.'

Jackie knew that he was right. 'Well, get on with it then, ya can't keep that daft alien waitin', can ya,' she said light heartedly, knowing that Rose would hear her and think that she had her blessing.

Once he was connected up, Mickey started up the Mini and started to tug on the console. The car bounced on the end of the chain, but the console didn't budge.

'Faster!' Rose called from inside the TARDIS, and Mickey started to burn rubber.

'Come on!' Mickey shouted at his car, banging the steering wheel.

'It's not moving!' Rose shouted, before the chain failed and Mickey shot forward in the Mini. Rose kicked the console in frustration, why was the TARDIS so reluctant to help her save the Doctor.

Rose sat on the jump seat with her feet on the console, disheartened by the failure of Mickey's idea. Jackie put a comforting hand on her knee.

'It was never going to work, sweetheart. And the Doctor knew that. He just wanted you to be safe.'

'I can't give up.'

'Lock the door. Walk away.' She wanted her daughter back, living a 'normal' life.

'Dad wouldn't give up,' Rose told her.

'Well, he's not here, is he? And even if he was, he'd say the same,' she told her. If only she knew what her dad was like.

'No, he wouldn't. He'd tell me to try anything. If I could save the Doctor's life, try anything.'

Jackie was taken by surprise; by the way Rose was talking about Pete, as if she knew what he was like. 'Well, we're never going to know,' she said as though that was an end to it.

Rose looked defiantly at her mum. 'Well, I know because I met him…. I met Dad.'

Jackie just looked at her, speechless. 'Don't be ridiculous.'

'The Doctor took me back in time, and I met Dad.'

'Don't say that,' Jackie snapped, she was just saying anything now to justify her actions.

'Remember when Dad died? There was someone with him.' Rose's voice started to break. 'A girl, a blonde girl. She held his hand. You saw her from a distance, Mum.' Tears started to roll down her cheeks. 'You saw her! Think about it. That was me…. You saw me.'

'Stop it,' Jackie shouted, this was nonsense.

'That's how good the Doctor is,' she told her.

'Stop it! Just stop it!' Jackie ran out of the TARDIS close to tears. All the talk of her dead husband was too much for her, and being in that impossible box was just making it worse.

Rose sat on the jump seat and cried. She cried for her father, who died in front of her, giving his life so that everyone could live. And she cried for her Doctor, who was going to die, so that everyone could live.

Jackie walked aimlessly, just thinking about Pete and their short time together. That roguish smile of his, which had attracted her to him from the start. She smiled as she remembered how he told her he was an entrepreneur, and was going to be a millionaire. 'Trust me on this', he had said.

He was a right 'Jack the lad', but she fell in love with him all the same. He was so nervous at the registry office when they got married, he got her name wrong. And all his mad, daft ideas, the flat was full of the makings of those mad, daft ideas.

And then she thought about that awful day, the day that changed her life forever and made her a single mother. When she saw Pete lying in the road, she didn't realise it was him, because…, there was a blonde girl kneeling by his side, holding his hand. She had thought they were a couple who were involved in a traffic accident.

When one of the guests went to offer first aid, he had recognised Pete, and that's when Jackie's world fell apart. That blonde girl, she'd only seen her at a distance, and from the back, but….

Jackie came out of her memories and realised where she was, was it some of the Doctor's weirdness, or was it her own subconscious that had brought her to 'Rodrigo's Vehicle Recovery Service', where a big yellow tow truck waited for her.

Rose and Mickey were leaning side by side against the Mini, contemplating the intransigent TARDIS.

'There's got to be somethin' else we can do,' Mickey said.

'Mum was right, maybe we should just lock the door and walk away.' Rose had cried herself out in the TARDIS, and she'd seen the similarities between the Doctor and her dad, how their lives played out the way they were supposed to, and couldn't be changed.

Mickey couldn't believe what he was hearing. 'I'm not havin' that. I'm not havin' you just, just give up now. No way. We just need somethin' stronger than my car. Somethin' bigger.' He turned to look at her and then saw it. 'Somethin' like that.'

A big yellow tow truck came around the corner, and they looked on in stunned amazement as they saw the driver, it was Jackie.

She climbed down from the cab and walked over to them. 'Right, you've only got this until six o'clock, so get on with it.'

'Mum, where the hell did you get that from?' Rose said with a laugh of disbelief.

'Rodrigo, he owes me a favour. Never mind why, but you were right about your dad, sweetheart. He was full of mad ideas, and it's exactly what he would've done. Now, get on with it before I change my mind,' she said as she threw the keys to Mickey.

Jackie watched once again as Rose and Mickey took a length of chain into the TARDIS. Mickey came out and started up the truck.

'Keep going!' Rose shouted, watching the chain strain against the console.

'Put your foot down!' Jackie called out, lifting her foot and imitating her foot on the accelerator.

They started taking it in turns to shout encouragement. 'Faster!' Rose shouted again.

'Give it some more, Mickey!'

'Keep going!'

'Come on, come on!'

'Keep going!'

As Jackie shouted 'Give it some more!' the console burst open, and the chain flew out onto the pavement.

Mickey jumped out of the cab and ran to the TARDIS doors, trying to get to Rose so that he could help her save the Doctor.

'Rose!' he cried as the doors slammed in his face.

Jackie put her hands to her mouth in horror, what had she done? She'd sent her daughter God knows where, to face God knows what.

She hadn't even had time to say goodbye.


	18. Chapter 18

**Chapter 18**

Time Lord regenerations were similar to the biological process of reproduction. In reproduction, DNA from the parents was recombined to form a new individual, who retained features of the parents.

In regeneration, the memories, beliefs, and aspirations of the Time Lord were usually retained, and a new personality (along with a new body) superimposed on the old one, creating a new individual with old memories.

In the Doctor's case however, his previous regeneration had been forced on him by the Sisterhood of Karn, and it was a cold blooded killer that sat upon the memories, beliefs, and aspirations of a healer, someone who made things better. That was never going to be a good combination.

And when the warrior came to the cold, logical conclusion that the Time Lords couldn't win the war, the only logical thing to do to save the universe from the savage annihilation by the Daleks, was to eliminate both protagonists, so that's what he did.

And when the bone weary, ancient warrior was convinced he had succeeded in destroying Time Lord and Dalek alike, not out of fear or hatred, but because there was no other way, there was no more need for a warrior.

No more.

And so a new regeneration started, a proper one, except this one was built on the memories and realisation of what the warrior had done. This new regeneration was full of guilt, shame, and remorse and it had taken the compassion of a young, human female to ask him what he was turning into, to stop him from becoming that which he most despised.

And now, a regeneration was happening again.

* * *

Rose's head was buzzing with a billion facts; her thoughts were both sharp and fuzzy at the same time. She knew she knew everything there was to know, all she had to do was recall it. She'd knock spots off them at the pub quiz in the King's Head. Forget the pub quiz, bring on Mastermind.

Hang on, somebody had kissed her, and it was fantastic. Talk about the Earth moving, she'd felt the universe move. If that was Mickey, he'd been taking lessons. Cheeky git, fancy stealing a kiss while she was asleep, I mean, it wasn't even like they were a couple anymore, was it?

['Isn't it?'] Her inner dialogue asked.

'Who's there?' she asked the darkness, no, it wasn't dark, it was a golden light.

['You know.']

'Bad . . . Wolf?' She remembered the name.

['Yeah, now, isn't it time you told him?']

'Yeah, but he's such a nice bloke, I don't want to hurt his feelings.'

['You'll hurt him even more if you don't tell him, and that is not a good foundation for a relationship.']

'Yeah, I suppose.' Rose thought about this. 'What is a good foundation then?'

['Hah! Ask me an easier question. Okay, how's this sound. Truth, you have to be true to each other, in word and deed.']

'Yeah, I can see that . . . go on.'

['Blimey, y'don't want much do ya. There's attraction and desire, respect and forgiveness, all mixed up together.']

'And what about love?' Rose asked quietly.

She could 'feel' a warm smile. ['Love is the sweet, sticky honey that binds it all together. You can respect your love's point of view, but still question his motives or methods. And no matter how perfect he thinks he is, he can still make a mistake, and you can forgive him.']

'I don't think Mickey would ever think of himself as perfect,' Rose laughed.

['Who said anything about Mickey?']

* * *

Rose found herself lying on the floor grating of the TARDIS near the console, staring up at the domed ceiling. 'What happened?'

The Doctor was leaning against the console, watching the Time Rotor pump up and down. 'Don't you remember?'

She propped herself up on her elbows. 'It's like there was this singing.'

'That's right. I sang a song and the Daleks ran away.'

Wow, hold on, that confused her. 'I was at home. No, I wasn't, I was in the TARDIS, and there was this light.' The Doctor looked at his hand; the veins were glowing under the skin. 'I can't remember anything else.'

She looked over to him, he seemed to be concerned about something, but she didn't know what.

He gave her that grin, and his motor mouth started up. 'Rose Tyler. I was going take you to so many places. Barcelona. Not the city Barcelona, the planet Barcelona. You'd love it. Fantastic place. They've got dogs with no noses. Imagine how many times a day you end up telling that joke, and it's still funny.'

She smiled at his terrible joke. 'Then, why can't we go?'

'Maybe you will, and maybe I will. But not like this.'

Now, she was starting to get concerned. 'You're not making sense.' Had the Daleks hurt him in some way?

'I might never make sense again. I might have two heads, or no head. Imagine me with no head. And don't say that's an improvement. But it's a bit dodgy, this process. You never know what you're going to end up with . . .' He suddenly doubles over in pain.

'Doctor!' Oh my God, they've poisoned him or something.

'Stay away!' he shouted. That hurt her, because she wanted to hug him and comfort him, she wanted to help him.

'Doctor, tell me what's going on,' she pleaded, he was scaring her.

'I absorbed all the energy of the Time Vortex; and no one's meant to do that. Every cell in my body's dying.'

Oh God, it was her, she'd looked into the heart of the TARDIS, and it was her fault! 'Can't you do something?'

'Yeah, I'm doing it now. Time Lords have this little trick; it's sort of a way of cheating death . . . Except it means I'm going to change; and I'm not going to see you again. Not like this. Not with this daft old face. And before I go . . .'

'Don't say that,' she snapped, she didn't want him to go, she'd only just got back to him, saved him from the Daleks, and now he was talking about going.

'Rose . . . before I go, I just want to tell you . . . you were fantastic . . .. Absolutely fantastic . . . And do you know what . . .? So was I.'

Rose smiled at him uncertainly, not knowing what to say or what to do. He looked at her one last time with those eyes, a sad smile on his face, before his head snapped back and he looked up at the ceiling with his arms wide. Golden light burst out of his body, as the regeneration energy overflowed and started to rewrite his cell structure. This was not going to be easy for him.

Time Lord regenerations can be influenced and affected by contamination with alien DNA and various energy sources, and right now, the Doctor had a significant amount of Artron energy that wasn't his.

Although he had discharged the energy from Rose, back into the TARDIS, there would always be a residual amount left behind that would take time to disperse, and time was one thing the Doctor didn't have.

The energy he absorbed from Rose was not the same energy that she absorbed from the TARDIS. Bad Wolf had been created from it, and she had transformed it to suit her needs. The Doctors regeneration was now being influenced by Bad Wolf.

Although his soul would still be the Doctor, his personality was being rewritten by the passion and humanity that was Rose Tyler; he was becoming her soul mate. A pure Gallifreyan with an undercurrent of human emotions that would lie dormant for a while, until slowly and silently they would crawl out of the dark recesses of his mind, and seek out the light.

Rose was crouching by a coral strut when the blinding light ended. There standing in front of her was a tall skinny man, wearing the same clothes that the Doctor had been wearing.

'Hello . . .. Okay . . .. Ooo . . . new teeth. That's weird. So, where was I? Oh, that's right. Barcelona.

* * *

 **48 Bucknall House, Powell Estate.**

 **Friday 15th September 2006.**

Jackie was sitting curled up on the sofa, sipping her rum and coke, with the photo album on her lap, and a box of tissues nearby. She was gently stroking the smiling face of her dead husband, who was grinning up at her.

'What am I gonna do, Pete?' she asked the eternally grinning man. 'It's been over a week now and still no word. Last year she was just off travellin', an' I still didn't know if she was alive or dead. This time though, she said the Doctor was gonna die, and that means she was goin' into danger.'

She grabbed a tissue and wiped her eyes again. 'I don't know if I can carry on like this Pete, I really don't . . . Mickey said she'd sent herself some kind of message, and that must mean she's alive to be able to do that . . . but I don't understand all that stuff.'

She leafed through some pages of the album and found one of Rose from Jericho Street Junior School which made her sob. She was beaming a proud smile with a bronze medal around her neck.

'Oh Rose, where are ya? Please come home,' she sobbed. She hadn't reported her missing this time around, what was the point? She doubted that the police would keep a missing person file open for two hundred thousand years. And would they even have police then? She'd seen the science fiction films, people would be micro chipped and they'd have Robocops.

She downed her drink and poured another one. As she did this, the pages flipped over, and when she looked, it was a picture of Mickey and Rose sitting with their arms around each other in Trafalgar Square, in happier days.

Jackie remembered that photo was not long after they'd gotten back together after that Jimmy Stone fiasco. What was wrong with Rose, why couldn't she just be happy with what she'd got? Mickey was a lovely lad, okay; he'd had a rough start with his father running off, and his mother not being able to cope with him. But his grandmother was the salt of the Earth, and she'd turned him into the decent lad he is today. He'd got a trade; he was loving, honest and dependable.

Oh, and human, she added as an extra proviso, he was human. She'd got one up on all the other mum's around here, who were worried about their kids running off with a 'bad one', at least they didn't have to worry about them being alien as well.

Jackie flipped the pages back to her favourite photo of Pete, and she looked longingly at his face. 'The trouble with your daughter is that she's too headstrong,' she told him. 'I don't know where she gets that from.' Pete just continued to grin at her from the photo.

'And the Doctor sent her back, he must have realised that she was in danger and he sent her away. Why would she go runnin' back into danger for a man she's only just met and hardly knows?'

The answer to that question was staring her in the face . . . Literally. It was probably the rum and cokes, but she was sure Pete was grinning at her because he knew the answer. She remembered the first time she'd seen that mischievous grin, the twinkle in the eyes and the chat up line, 'My names Pete Tyler, remember that name, because one day I'll be a millionaire'.

Her breath caught in her chest as the realisation hit her like a physical blow. She'd seen another mischievous grin recently, a twinkle in ancient blue eyes, and Rose had probably heard a chat up line something like, 'I can take you anywhere in time and space'.

Tears splashed harmlessly on the plastic coated grin of her dead husband, as she realised her daughter was in love.

* * *

Rose was trying to make sense of what had just happened.

The tall, skinny man ran around the console as though he knew what he was doing with it. '6 PM . . . Tuesday . . . October . . . 5006 . . . On the way to Barcelona!'

Rose was really scared as the stranger grinned at her. Why was he grinning like that, what was he going to do to her?

'Now then . . . what do I look like?' he asked.

'No, no no . . . no no no no no no no. No. Don't tell me,' he said, holding up his hand. He seemed to be some kind of idiot; Rose couldn't help smiling at his odd behaviour.

'Let's see . . . two legs, two arms, two hands . . . Slight weakness in the dorsal tendon.'

Rose noticed that he seemed to be taking an inventory of his body, as though he'd never seen it before. Suddenly he reached up to his head.

'Hair! I'm not bald!' he exclaimed, startling Rose. 'Oh, Oh! Big hair!'

Sideburns, I've got sideburns! Or really bad skin. Little bit thinner . . . That's weird. Give me time, I'll get used to it.'

He stopped talking, and looked at Rose which made her nervous again, what was he going to do now? He seemed a little unstable.

'I . . . have got . . . a mole. I can feel it, between my shoulder blades, there's a mole.

Rose was getting concerned; this stranger seemed to be delighted that he'd discovered a mole on his back, a mole that surely he must have had most of his life.

'That's all right. Love the mole,' he said with another grin.

Oh this poor man, what had the Daleks done to him? Because Rose was convinced that the Daleks had taken the Doctor, and somehow put this unfortunate, mentally ill person in his place. Maybe they'd wiped his mind or something; that would certainly explain his behaviour.

The man straightened himself and faced Rose. 'Go on then, tell me . . . what do you think?'

He was now focussing on Rose, and she asked the burning question. 'Who are you?'

The man seemed hurt by her question. 'I'm the Doctor.'

"Oh, this poor man, they've brainwashed him into thinking he's the Doctor" Rose thought, why would they do that?

'No . . . Where is he? Where's the Doctor? What have you done to him?'

'You saw me, I, I changed . . .' he said, pointing over his shoulder with his thumb. 'Right in front of you.'

'I saw him sort of explode, and then you replaced him, like a . . . a teleport or a transmat or a body swap or somethin'.'

This seemed to stun the man into silence. Rose edged towards the man and pushed his chest to see if he was real.

'You're not foolin' me,' she warned him.

The man didn't react, he just rocked backwards, seemingly disappointed by Rose's reaction.

Rose needed this stranger to realise that she wasn't just some naive know nothing. 'I've seen all sorts of things. Nano genes . . . Gelth . . . Slitheen . . .'

The spiky haired stranger reacted to Slitheen, if he was Slitheen, she was dead. 'Oh, my God, are you a Slitheen?'

He could see that she was distressed, and tried to reassure her 'I'm not a Slitheen.'

Rose was desperate now. 'Send him back. I'm warnin' you; send the Doctor back right now!' she shouted.

'Rose, it's me,' he pleaded. 'Honestly, it's me. I was dying. To save my own life I changed my body. Every single cell, but . . . it's still me,' he said, smiling kindly at her.

'You can't be,' she whispered, nearly in tears.

'Then how could I remember this? Very first word I ever said to you. Trapped in that cellar. Surrounded by shop window dummies . . . oh . . . such a long time ago. I took your hand . . .' He gently reached out and took her hand. 'I said one word . . . just one word, I said . . .'Run'.'

Rose felt it, as she'd always felt it, that tingle up her spine when he held her hand. 'Doctor?' she sobbed uncertainly.

He grinned at her lovingly. 'Hello.'

* * *

 **48 Bucknall House, Powell Estate.**

 **Christmas Eve 2006.**

Jackie was sitting in the living room, putting the final touches to the Christmas decorations, hanging the last bauble on the tree. She picked up the presents to put under the tree and stopped.

'To Rose, Merry Christmas, Lots of love, Mum x', she'd written on the label. She felt tears stinging her eyes as she looked out of the window, wondering where her daughter was, and whether she would ever see her again. It had been three months now, and still no word.

It was the not knowing that was the worst. She had seen it on the news, many times before, where families pleaded on camera for information about missing relatives. She never thought she would be in that position herself, and wondered how those families coped, because she didn't think she could take much more of this. The thought of spending Christmas alone was breaking her heart, and her soul.

She'd stopped trying to phone Rose after the first week, when her mobile kept saying 'it has not been possible to connect your call'. What Jackie didn't realise was, that the more she phoned, the more the calls stacked up in the paradox avoidance buffer in the TARDIS. How could she know that if she phoned once a day in Earth time, and only an hour had passed in TARDIS time, there was no way it could allow the calls to connect.

Another thing Jackie found difficult, was that there was only Mickey she could talk to about Rose. All her neighbours and friends had been told a cover story that she was still working as an au pair in France.

'Ooh, I bet Rose looks lovely in those saucy maids' uniforms they have to wear,' Grandma Prentice had said when Jackie explained where Rose supposedly was.

'No Mum, she doesn't have to wear . . . Oh, never mind. Yes Mum, she looks lovely,' she had said. And so it went on from day to day, wondering, waiting, and hoping, rushing to the phone every time it rang, and each time being disappointed.

She sighed and put the presents under the tree, before opening the few envelopes of greetings cards that had been pushed through the letterbox by her neighbours.

'Oh, that's nice,' she said as she read the card from the little old lady across the way, that she did a blue rinse for once a month. She'd write a card out after lunch and take it around, and see if there was anything she needed before the shops shut for Christmas.

She was hanging the cards on a string across the wall, when she felt something in her chest. Oh God, don't say she was having palpitations from all the stress and worry, that's all she needed, Christmas in hospital.

Then she heard it, buzzing in her head, a grinding, wheezing sound that sounded like something was trying to tear a hole in the very air itself. She knew that sound, and oh God how it filled her heart with hope and joy.

'ROSE!' she said as she ran for the door. She ran along the walkway and took the stairs two at a time down to the street, where she pushed through the security door and started searching for the source of that sound.

* * *

 **Clancy's Garage, Powell Estate.**

 **Christmas Eve 2006.**

Mickey, Stevo and John, were working the morning, just to deal with emergency repairs and breakdowns before they closed for the Christmas holiday and headed down to the pub for a Christmas drink. The radio was covered with a token piece of tinsel, and Slade were belting out "Merry Christmas Everybody".

John was trying to persuade a seized brake calliper to cooperate, by whacking it with a hammer, when Mickey felt it in his chest. He couldn't have heard it, not with all the noise in the workshop. And it was like last time, when Rose came back on her own, he'd felt it then, as though his senses were finely tuned to that particular sound.

'Hey, turn that down. Turn it off, Stevo. Turn that off! John, shut up!' When the workshop went quiet, he could hear it, the unmistakable sound of the TARDIS, bending its way through time and space. He took off at a gallop in the direction of Bucknall House.

Jackie ran through the square, searching the sky, her heart soaring as the noise became more distinct. She saw Mickey run into the square. 'MICKEY!' she shouted.

'Jackie, it's the TARDIS!' he told her, just in case she hadn't recognised that unmistakable sound.

She was too excited to give him one of her usual sarcastic responses. 'I know, I know, I heard it. She's alive, Mickey. I said so, didn't I? She's alive!' she said, pulling on his arm to get his attention.

He put his hand up in a shushing motion, still looking upwards. 'Just shut up a minute,' he said trying to localise the sound.

'Well, where is it then?' she asked him, desperate for it to appear and bring her daughter home . . . for Christmas.

Suddenly, above them, the sky seemed to distort, as though a pebble had been dropped into a pool. A familiar, wooden blue box came through the distortion and bounced off the wall of the flats in front of them. It ricocheted off another block of flats, and shot over their heads, making them dive for the floor. It narrowly avoided flattening a post office van, before ploughing into a couple of metal wheelie bins and coming to rest.

* * *

'And we never stopped, did we?' The spiky haired man who was apparently the Doctor asked her. 'All across the universe. Running, running, running,' he said as he ran around the console, adjusting the controls.

'One time we had to hop. Do you remember? Hopping for our lives?' He hopped madly up and down on the spot as Rose stood with her back against a coral pillar, watching him cautiously.

'Yeah? All that hopping? Remember hopping for your life? Yeah?! Hop? With the . . .' He was going to say "power boots", but the look of uncertainty on Rose's face stopped him. 'No?'

'Can you change back?' she asked hopefully.

'Do you want me to?'

'Yeah.' Oh she SO wanted this lunatic to change back into her sensible Doctor.

'Oh,' he said sheepishly.

'Can you?'

'No,' he said disappointedly, briefly glancing down at the floor. 'Do you want to leave?' he asked sadly.

'Do you want me to leave?' she asked uncertainly, unable to hide the disappointment in her voice.

'No!' he exclaimed quickly. 'But . . . your choice . . . if you want to go home . . .' He wanted her to stay with him, but he could see how upset she was. He wasn't sure she would accept him in his new body.

He went to the console again. 'Cancel Barcelona. Change to . . . London . . . the Powell Estate . . . ah . . . let's say the 24th of December.' He looked up at Rose 'Consider it a Christmas present.'

Rose edged slowly closer the console.

'There,' he said as he stepped back, his arms tucked under his armpits in an almost defensive manner.

Rose looked at him, then back at the console. The TARDIS shuddered as it changed direction. 'I'm going home?'

'Up to you. Back to your mum . . . it's all waiting. Fish and chips, sausage and mash, beans on toast.' He stopped and thought about it. 'No, Christmas! Turkey! Although . . . having met your mother . . . nut loaf would be more appropriate.'

Rose looked down quickly, to hide a smile. The Doctor and her mum had never really got on.

'Was that a smile?' he asked teasingly.

'No,' she lied.

'That was a smile . . .' he said knowingly.

'No it wasn't.'

'You smiled . . .'

'No I didn't.'

'Oh, come on, all I did was change, I didn't . . . gargh!' He suddenly gagged as the TARDIS shuddered.

Rose looked at him questioningly. 'What?'

'I said I didn't . . .' It happened again, more violently. He made nasty retching noise. 'Uh oh.'

Rose edged cautiously around the console. 'Er... is you alright?'

Golden Artron energy issued from the Doctor's mouth. 'What's that?' Rose asked with concern.

'Oh . . . the change is going a bit wrong and all . . . gargh.' He gagged again and fell to his knees, his face contorted.

'Look . . . maybe we should go back. Let's go and find Captain Jack, he'd know what to do,' Rose suggested.

'Gargh, he's busy! He's got plenty to do rebuilding the Earth!'

A lever on the console suddenly caught his eye 'I haven't used this one in years.'

He flicked the lever and the TARDIS shuddered violently, nearly knocking them off their feet.

'What're you doing?!' asked Rose with a hint of panic.

'Putting on a bit of speed!' he said manically. 'That's it!' He turned more knobs while Rose tried to maintain a more secure grip on the console.

'My beautiful ship! Come on, faster! That's a girl!' he said, looking and sounding crazy. 'Faster! Wanna to break the time limit?!'

'STOP IT!' she shouted at him, her fear making her angry.

'Ah, don't be so dull,' he said to her as though she was a party pooper. 'Let's have a bit of fun! Let's rip through that Vortex!' He thrust his arm into the air.

When he saw the scared look on her face, he seemed to gain some control of himself. 'The regeneration's going wrong. I can't stop myself,' he explained, and then grimaced in pain. 'Ah, my head . . .' He bent forward and leaned on the console, before springing up again and acting like a maniac.

'Faster! Let's open those engines!' he laughed.

Rose heard a bell ringing and looked around in alarm. 'What's that?'

Suddenly, he was in her face beside her. 'We're gonna crash land!' he laughed.

Oh God, this man has the audacity to call himself the Doctor. Her Doctor would never knowingly put her at risk like this. 'Well then, do something!' she admonished.

'Too late! Out of control!' he giggled. 'Oh, I love it! Hot dawg!' he said as he leaped into the air.

'You're gonna kill us!' Rose shouted in fear.

'Hold on tight, here we go!' he grinned. 'Christmas Eve . . .!'

The man who called himself the Doctor, held on tight to the console as the TARDIS hit something; Rose was thrown across the room and landed heavily against a coral strut, which winded her.

'Yeehah!' the spiky haired man shouted.

Before Rose could recover, there was another impact, and Rose was thrown heavily to the floor, where she rolled around, dazed and confused, as the TARDIS shuddered to a halt.

'Are you all right?' he called over to her in concern.

'Urrgh . . . yeah,' she gasped. 'I think so.'

As soon as he heard that she was all right, he was all manic again, running down the ramp to the door.

'Here we are then, London. Earth. The Solar System. We did it.' He stepped out of the TARDIS and saw two familiar, if puzzled, faces.

'Jackie. Mickey. Blimey! No, no, no, no, hold on. Wait there. I've got something to say. There was something I had to tell you, something important. What was it? No, hold on, hold on. Hold on, shush, shush, shush, shush. Oh, I know! Merry Christmas!' With his important message delivered, he collapsed into Mickey's arms.

Rose shook her head and, using the handrail, managed to pull herself to her feet. She felt as though she'd been hit by a truck. She looked around the console room. 'Oh God, where's he gone?' she asked herself. She stumbled down the ramp, took a deep breath, and stepped outside.

She could see the man lying on the ground. 'What happened? Is he all right?'

'I don't know, he just keeled over,' Mickey said looking up at her. 'But who is he? Where's the Doctor?'

'That's him, right in front of you. That's the Doctor.'

Jackie looked at her daughter in confusion, the delight at seeing her alive, momentarily forgotten. 'What do you mean, that's the Doctor . . .? Doctor who?'

 **The End**


End file.
